Francis is the Founder of Bull Bitcoin, one of the best bitcoin brokerage services. They recently launched a self custody mobile wallet on ios and android: Bull Wallet. This rip was earlier today, in person, in Lugano. We are both here for the PlanB Forum.
Francis on Nostr: https://primal.net/francis
Francis on X: https://x.com/francispouliot_
Bull Wallet: https://wallet.bullbitcoin.com
PlanB Forum: https://planb.lugano.ch/planb-forum/
EPISODE: 181
BLOCK: 920238
PRICE: 929 sats per dollar
(00:00:00) Catching up from Lugano: old rips, 2019 memories, and lore
(00:01:07) Introducing Bull Wallet: goals, BDK under the hood, and UX vision
(00:02:21) Lightning lessons: LDK attempts, liquidity pain, and Phoenix tradeoffs
(00:04:38) Fee shocks and “just-in-time” channels: why Liquid entered the plan
(00:06:24) Liquid + Boltz atomic swaps: architecture, Rootstock notes, and standards push
(00:07:37) Designing for privacy and power users: Sparrow on mobile, Payjoin journey
(00:12:21) Data minimization in practice: no push, no cloud leaks, strict dependencies
(00:13:56) Shipping realities: iOS approval grind and cross‑platform necessity
(00:15:11) Secure versus Instant: Liquid framing, hype cycles, and collaborative custody
(00:19:13) The UX–compromise matrix: placing Liquid among trust models
(00:21:24) Auto‑swap safety rails: keeping Liquid balances modest by default
(00:24:26) Confidential transactions and buying flows: privacy wins via Liquid
(00:27:24) Swap providers and resilience: Boltz today, multi‑provider tomorrow
(00:31:05) Builders who ship: moving fast, potentially Ark or Spark in the future
(00:32:11) Why Ark: unilateral exits, pre‑confirmed states, and costs
(00:50:00) Ark tradeoffs without soft forks: watchtowers, refresh, and liveness
(00:57:15) Ark vs Liquid in Bull Wallet: timelines, reckless testing, and user defaults
(01:04:12) Payjoin, heuristics, and passive consolidation
(01:11:01) Consolidation strategies: Liquid swaps, CT, and fee‑aware UTXO management
(01:15:48) Lightning address UX with Liquid: directories, costs, and tiny payments
(01:17:10) Nostr as a wallet backend: zaps, contact book, and secure comms
(01:18:01) Multisig in practice: BitPay’s UX, Miniscript future, and mobile approvals
(01:20:19) Operator messaging and alerts: following npubs inside the app
(01:20:49) Core v30, OP_RETURN, and policy vs consensus
(01:31:09) Funding open source: OpenSats, private companies, and shipping culture
(01:35:15) Why open source keeps us sane: creativity, legacy, and closing notes
more info on the show: https://citadeldispatch.com
learn more about me: https://odell.xyz
[00:00:00]
ODELL:
What is up, freaks? It's Odell here. I got another in person rep this time from Lugano. Audio only. We got a good friend here, absolute legend, Francis. How's it going, Francis? I'm doing great, man. Thanks for having me. It's It's a pleasure. I've we haven't, have you ever been on Dispatch, dude? I've been I've been on
[00:00:20] Francis Pouliot:
the the Dispatch with Marty, I think, like, I don't know, like, six years ago or seven years. Oh, Marty's show. Right?
[00:00:26] ODELL:
I don't I don't remember. Oh, no. We did it together in 2019. At the Bitcoin conference The first week going on. San Francisco. Yeah. Oh my god. Okay. So we've gotten a lot done since then. Oh, yeah. That day was the day Marty found out he was having his first kid. I remember and then we got trashed on the roof. Yeah. I think we got trashed before the rip also. We were there. Yeah. During the rip too. And Bitcoin topped at 13 k that day. Yeah. And I told everyone to smash buy. And for two years, we were under 13 k, and everyone said I was a fucking idiot. Oh, well, who's the who's the idiot now? Now we're just a humble 10 x guy since then. Okay. So I got a couple topics for us. Let's just dive right in.
First topic, you guys released the new self custody bull Bitcoin wallet. Yep. Fucking awesome. I've been playing with it. So, I mean, to the freaks that haven't used it yet, first of all, you can just you can download it in your favorite app store, Bull Wallet. Just search Bull Wallet, or you can go to wallet.bitcoin @wallet.bullbitcoin.com. But, what is the wallet? Why should people care?
[00:01:33] Francis Pouliot:
Yeah. So the wallet is, typical classic Bitcoin wallets is, is, is the core of it. So we're using BDK under the hood, the Bitcoin dev kit. I've been involved with the Bitcoin dev kit project for like almost like three years. Yeah, they're awesome. They're really awesome. What makes the bolt wallet I guess special or different or part of like a new wave of bitcoin wallet, which is by the way like one of the hot topics of this conference it's like that we call them like the next generation wallets is that actually originally I wanted to do an LDK wallet. Originally my goal was to have a full blown like Phoenix style, fully self custodial, like lightning note on your phone wallet. So that's actually how we started. Right. And I built we started to build on on LDK and then I got kind of like I got a little bit black build on lightning because of that because, like, lightning does a lot of things, like, really well. Like lightning is is really phenomenal, but there are things that you simply cannot abstract away with lightning.
And you know, I don't have to go into the details, but it's, it's, it's got to do with, the liquidity management, right? Like the backup stuff, that's fine. Like running a node on your phone is fine. It's doable. It's just the light, the liquidity management. And, and, and also there's like, it's not just technical, there's like economic components to it. Like, let's say, all right, I'm a developer. I want to launch a wallet and to find an LSP, of course. Right? And imagine, like, you have a thousand users with a thousand, dollars worth of of channels. You have, a million dollars of liquidity that needs to be locked up by an LSP doable.
But once you get to a 100,000 users or a million users, you're talking about a fuck ton of money. Anyway The cap the capital management's Yeah. So, you know, I'm like, alright. So the LDK wallet's not happening. So what if Really, Phoenix has been the only one who's too close to pulling it up. Fucking legends, man. Because what they're doing is, like, really, really, really hard. And also, I I I honestly didn't think that we were gonna be able to do what Phoenix did. Like, they're they're exceptionally good. And they're I mean, their nose, I I don't know how many millions of dollars is on their node right now. I'm pretty sure it's the biggest node on the network. I think Async is probably the biggest node. But I just feel like that's an important thing to just,
[00:03:49] ODELL:
iron in here because if the freaks are like me, I've run a ton of lightning notes, twenty four seven lightning notes in my life. I still run a couple mostly because, I need, like, twenty four seven uptime or whatever for certain tasks including, getting SATS. They support the show with SATS. But my go to wallet on a day to day basis has been Phoenix. Right? I take a single coinjoin UTXO, drop it a big a big UTXO. It works better with bigger UTXOs, drop it into Phoenix, and then I just make my payments as I need to. And now that the bull wallet's out, I find myself sitting there, I'm like, which one do I use going forward? Mhmm.
Well, there because there's different it's a different trade off balance, but it it's filling the similar need for me, right, which is just I wanna top up my eSIM or I wanna send a quick lightning payment, and I could easily just open the bulldog and make the payment. So
[00:04:39] Francis Pouliot:
So Phoenix works now. The reason why I got black billed is actually because I was at the El Salvador conference in 2023 exactly during the first ordinal, fee wave and I'm onboarding a guy to Phoenix in El Salvador. And I'm like, I'm gonna send you your first payment. Right. Right? And then what Phoenix does is called the just in time channel. They will open a channel at the same time as the guy's receiving money. So I'm sending the guy $5. Instead of an unpaid transaction. Yes. But the fees were like a 175, I don't know, SaaS provider or something. So the fee to open the channel It was like $4 or something. No. Way more. Yeah. Way more. Like like $30 or something like that. Right? So so like the the pure Phoenix model works well economically,
[00:05:22] ODELL:
when the fees are low. I guess even right now where fees are basically zero it's still like 60¢ or something. Yeah yeah
[00:05:29] Francis Pouliot:
yeah so I'm like you know in my bed in the middle of the night and I'm just like oh my god like are we gonna have to do a custodial wallet? I'm, like, freaking out because, you know, for for people who, like, don't know me, I'm, like, you know, mister self custody. Right? So, like, you know No no custodial lever. No no custodial lever, and that's always been, like, my my North Star. It's, like, self custody at all costs. Like, everything I do is to support or facilitate self custody. And I'm like, how the fuck we're gonna do that? So that's when the idea of using the liquid network came in. Right? So, and and this and I think a lot of people have the same idea are pretty much around the same time. And that same time is literally, like, the ordinals span wave. So it's it's not a coincidence, because we all kind of, like, felt the same, felt the same kind of, like, problem that I was having with with the just in time, like, LDK, like, full lightning node model.
And, yeah. So the idea was alright. So let's build a Bitcoin wallet that has a, Bitcoin wallet inside and a liquid network wallet inside. The thing with the Liquid Network is that, there there's no there's nobody else using it. Right? So there's no merchants using the Liquid Network. They're all using the Lightning Network. So somehow we needed to find a way to move value between the liquid network and whatever other wallet the person was using. And that's where this company came in called, Bolts. So Bolts, my fucking favorite company in Bitcoin, they're absolute legends. They're absolutely amazing. So what these guys did is they built an API that creates a non custodial atomic swap between various networks Yep. And Lightning. Between Bitcoin and Lightning, between Liquid and and Lightning, between Rootstock and Lightning, and now between arc and lightning. Yeah. Alright. So so liquid was the first iteration. So People don't realize rootstock is actually decently used by degen's in Latin America. Like They found that out when we went to Brazil. Rootstock has some
[00:07:32] ODELL:
think that was, like, something that I heard of, like, six years ago. It's a thing. It's yeah. Yeah. It's a thing. It's real.
[00:07:37] Francis Pouliot:
So yeah. So bull Bitcoin, it's a a bitcoin wallet and a liquid wallet. And then when you send and receive, there's a non custodial atomic lightning swap. And that's really It's like the moon, but with liquid. That's exactly that's exactly it's like it's like moon, but with liquid and without the retarded backup that, you know, system that Moon invented. Right. Just as a seed backup. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, for us, we are obsessed with standardization also, in the wallet. So even here, one of the reasons I'm here is to help kind of, like, figure out stuff with ARC to make sure that all the ARC wallets that are popping up, like, really quickly are are on the same standard. So we have we're here specifically to also partly build standards for ARC. We'll talk about ARC in a second. Let's continue on this wallet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and then my goal you know, so, like, people know, man. I'm an OG. I'm like a cypherpunk. So the the the wallet that I I I build a product that I wanna use. Right? So I'm I'm at this point in my Bitcoin journey where I've done a lot of stuff and now I want to do something for me. Like, the wallet is a very ego it's a it's a fully ego driven project. Right? So first of all, I want to build something for me that I really want to use personally.
I also kind of consider it to be almost like, performance art or something like that or like, I I want that to be like what people remember before. Like, like, I want that to be my legacy because the Bullbick One exchange will close one day, you know. It's it's a fiat business. It's literally an exchange is a fucking it's the most fiat business ever. All they do is deal with that. Hyperbitcoinization. We're not touching fiat. Yeah. Of course. And, like, an open, an open source bitcoin wallet will hopefully, like, outlast me and at the very least the code will always exist and people in a in a thousand years are probably gonna, you know, I'm gonna probably inscribe a copy of the source code on my tomb or something, you know, it's gonna be my legacy.
So I wanted it to be kind of like very easy to use, but also super cyberpunk. So some of so like the concept of the wallet is to is to make it sexy and and UX friendly, but also have cyberpunk features inside it. Right? So, from, you know, my goal with the wallet, for example, is to is for it to be kind of like a Sparrow substitutes for mobile. Right? So imagine Sparrow is kind of like a gold standard of the desktop wallet because it gives you control. Yeah. We like Sparrow. Right? So so Sparrow is amazing because you can control everything. You have very good coin selection and labeling. You obvious of course you can connect your own nodes and of course with Sparrow you can connect your hardware wallet. Yeah. Right. So it's got the coin selection, it's got the hardware wallet, it's got your own nodes, they They have privacy features. They had Whirlpool in there.
You can do operations with descriptors. You can update your port card for so it's like it's like a massive it's like a software individual toolbox. That's what Sparrow says. Piece of software that is my my all my projects and companies Yep. And my family relies on. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Additional piece of desktop software. Uh-huh. Just like the best. It doesn't come No. No. No. Exactly. You know, and, like like, you have, like, Electrum, which is kind of there too, you know, but I personally use Sparrow just just because it's it's I've it showed Sparrow to my mom, by the way, and, she she finds she finds it very intuitive. Like Well, that's what's cool about it. It's like for a power user, it has literally everything you'd ever need. Yeah. But for the average person, they can figure it out and use it. And that's what I wanna do for mobile. That's what I wanna do for mobile. And that's the goal of the bull bitcoin wallet.
And, you know, so some of the things that kind of, made us stand out, like, we were the first wallets to integrate, PayJoin v two. We were kind of like the reckless version of PayJoin. It's gonna get way better. Like, Pay PayJoin the the new version of the last, like, stable version of pay join, like, is is coming out. It it was pretty reckless to do that on mobile, to be honest. But it worked. Like, pay join actually did work.
[00:11:26] ODELL:
We have, like The pay join piece is still a little bit rough around the edges. Right? It it is. I mean trouble making It is. Yeah. Even in, like, test environments.
[00:11:33] Francis Pouliot:
And it's also incompatible with, like there's, like, breaking changes to the page on protocol, but we've literally just, they launched the version one point zero point zero of page on, like, last week. So page on is is is basically going to become stable and standardized starting basically now. So for example, the other companies that, like, Cake, for example, and Bull, Cake is the other wallet that makes us PayJoin. Yeah. Right? We were, like, on incompatible versions of page joins, so you we can actually Oh, so is that what you're working? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because page join kept making these changes as well. The wall would detect that it was a page join compatible wallet. Yeah. It wouldn't make the transaction. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And and and page join also has, like, a server component to it. And same with Wasabi. I was Wasabi is the other one that supports it, I think. Right? Yeah. But Wasabi I couldn't get it to work with Wasabi. Incompatible versions. Okay. Fair enough. So it was it was it was a little it was a little reckless. But yeah. So But it doesn't matter. It's not like any funds are lost. It just the transaction doesn't work. Right. Right. And, like, of course, I also wanted to have a privacy first wallet. And it's, like, people when people think about privacy wallets, they think, like, oh, so you don't have coin join? No. No. There's, like, there's other aspects to it. Like, so no push notifications, like zero data collection whatsoever.
[00:12:45] ODELL:
There's, like, all sorts of That's where Phoenix really falls flat. They do a lot of, like, the Yeah. So so we Edge Dev, iOS, Android checks where they're doing, like, push notifications,
[00:12:55] Francis Pouliot:
cloud backups. Yeah. No. And and the the mobile front dev team, specifically the ones that work on the wallet are are very strict. Very, very, very severe in terms of, like, dependency on on, like, servers and stuff like that. So, of course, like, now, well, now what we have. Okay. So what we have, so I have I've actually been using it for, like, two and a half years. Okay. We're on version 6.2 now, but we, we came to a point where I was, like, comfortable promoting it. Right? I mean Right? I mean, we we actually got, like, 10,000 users just through, over the last two years literally not try like, literally not trying to to to push it because it was you know, there's bugs. Right? There's there's, like, no there's no, like, catastrophic lose your money bugs, but, you know, there's, like, shitty shitty UX bugs. Right?
But now we reached a point where we're like, okay. We're we're ready to to start to start, like, commercializing it. So, yeah, what we recently announced was the the iOS launch. IOS was actually, very hard. Like, very hard, spiritually even. It took us a long time a long, long time to get iOS Apple to approve it. I have, like, 250 emails back and forth. Experience. Yeah. I almost gave up. Yeah. I almost gave up. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:21] ODELL:
So what else is there there to say about this? I think look. It's pain in the ass working with, Apple on the App Store. But if you want, like, an actual mass massively used wallet Oh, you gotta meet people where they are. And it needs to be on both because Yeah. From, like, a from a recommendation point of view, I mean, you've been doing this as long as me. Yeah. As soon as I have to ask, like, oh, we're using Android or iPhone and then recommend a different wallet for them, it breaks apart. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Being able to say, like, download primal For sure. It just doesn't matter where it is or download bull wallet Mhmm. Is is absolutely key. Okay. So what I wanna talk about real quick is, so you're using liquid, it's like moon, the freaks know moon because I was showing moon like crazy, where I rest and but instead of with moon, I I rest, it sits on the liquid network. Mhmm. And then you're doing on demand swaps.
First, a comment. I really like how in the wallet you say you have the on chain wallet which is secure you call it secure bitcoin and then instant payments which I think is just immediately intuitive it's like okay I'm not keeping my life savings in instant payments, I'm keeping that in the secure wallet and so I really like that framing. I think that you don't have to explain it to the user. A lot of people have passed it, like, called it, like, checking versus savings account. Mhmm. But where we're going, most people don't know what checking and savings accounts are. Right? So I think that's a really good frame. So good job on that. Liquid is something that for probably, like, ten years now, I've been I've I've I've, fallen into the hype cycle of liquid maybe four or five times. We're like, this is the moment that liquid is actually gonna be used.
I feel like this might be it. Yeah. But I've been there before. The the big issue that people have with liquid, we've talked about this in the past, and I just wanna be clear with it, is it is a collaborative custody model. So it's a multisig federation. You can't you can't leave on demand. You you need permission to leave. You need if the bolt is down, you can't get out of liquid. How do you how do you think about that as like, you said, you know, you wanna reduce dependencies? Yeah. Does that keep you up at night? Like, do you have a bunch of users that are in liquid? Maybe they're not able to get out. How do you, like what are the mitigations there?
[00:16:36] Francis Pouliot:
This is this is probably my my favorite topic to discuss in in the entire world, and, I'm just gonna do a quick shout out to Roy from Greece, which which also is is is a is a very forward thinking person in terms of rethinking custody versus trustlessness. Right? So, technically, liquid is self custodial. Like, on a technical level, like, you own the LVTC assets. Right? But of course it's not you're self cussing the irony. It's like it's not trustless you know it's kind of like you know if you have if you have a tether on your I don't know whatever fuck like if you're in wallet right yeah and trust wallet you are self cussing tether but of course tether, the organization is the one at the end of the day, which is guaranteeing the peg. Right. Right. And the peg is guaranteed because tether will send you a fiat wire transfer in exchange for your USDT.
Yeah. At some point, there is there is a a a redeemer of last resort. Right? I would go so far as to say, like, it's impossible to self custody, like, Tron or something. It's it's it's Because or or because it's just a centralized network. So at the end of the day, there's trust in Justin Sun. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And and there there's there's certainly not trustless. So the way that I see, liquid, I see it as a Bitcoin stable coin. Right. Kind of. Right? So so it's a stable coin. It's another coin which is backed one to one by Bitcoin and the job the job of the liquid federation is to guarantee the peg. Right. It's not and they guarantee the peg by custodying an amount of bitcoin which is equivalent to the amount of liquid bitcoin, right, in a multisig.
So from a strict technical perspective, they're not custodying your bitcoin. They're guaranteeing a one to one peg between your liquid Bitcoin and and that is And uptime. They're guaranteeing peg and uptime. Right? And there actually is a legal distinction also here, where I don't think legally that liquid is a custodian. I think legally the the liquid network for and and that has to do with, you know, KYC regulation and how to, like, avoid that. So liquid actually, like, somehow has a has a very clever way to avoid being, there's no k y c a m l on liquid. Like it's, it's a blockchain, right? Quote unquote.
But, the thing that I really liked about liquid is that it exists. Right. And that it works. Right. So, it's it's really easy to to criticize something and say that another model could be better, but the other model doesn't exist whereas the existing model works. And the way that I see it, there's so okay. So there is a scale here. Right? There's two axis. There's the y axis and the x axis. And the way I see it, there's a UX and compromise matrix. Right? And by compromise, I mean compromising on on core cyclical values of self custody, of privacy, of trustlessness, and permissionlessness. Right? So typically what a company will do is that they will compromise on the ethos in order to gain UX points. Yes. Right? That's and it's it's almost like and think think of, like, the the coin bases and the big pays and all of these, you know, people, they they they very quickly compromise to gain, marginal UX points. They're the UX. Yeah. Right? Whereas I I have and there's, like, these dots on on the matrix where I think what what what I wanna do is I have a certain level of compromise over which I will not walk the line, and I need to stay under this compromise level, but I wanna increase my UX points under this compromise level. It's hard for the freaks to see that because I'm literally waiting with my hands right now and I'm like trying to like trying to make you imagine a chart. But, but liquid is, for me, orders of magnitudes more secure than, like, was it Satoshi? Right. And, you know, orders of magnitude more secure than cash in, orders of magnitude more secure than FEDI, and now and it exists and it works. Okay? So, I'm not Maybe not FEDI.
I mean, technically technically what the what the FEDI rate. This product How it's implemented the federate. Right? So the thing is how it's implemented actually makes a difference. Right? So technically, you could have you could have, like, a FETI that has 15 very professionally run Right. We just don't have that yet. We just don't have that yet. Right? So again, like, liquid exists. But, I obviously my fear with using the wallet was that people were accidentally gonna confuse liquid with Bitcoin. Yeah. It's it's really hard to to not cognitively overwhelm a person, but also not mislead them at the same time. It's very, very difficult. Yep. Right? It requires a lot of finesse in in UX. And thank you for saying, I actually spent a lot of time trying to figure that one out. It was good. Instant payments versus secured Bitcoin. And, you know, like, a common balance, but also two separate balances that I have to look at. It's it's it's tough. So one of the things that I did, is the auto swap. Yeah. I think the auto swap is is the fucking greatest feature of the bull bitcoin wallet. As soon as the auto swap is a million sats, by default, and then as soon as you reach a million sass on liquid, the next time you open the wallet, it will auto swap into the secret into bitcoin on chain. So that there's, like, a mechanism to prevent people from accidentally Interesting. Because you're not you're not really supposed to have more than $500 in a liquid wallet or like a thousand or maybe like a couple thousand. If you're I don't know. Depends on what you're spending, you know? Yeah. Depends. What it it should real the hard part is is it's like a percentage of your stack. Yeah. Of course. Of course. So it's on a case case by case basis. Right? And, like, you know, if if you're like a rich guy, you know, and you're spending Bitcoin, you know, I I spend, thousands of dollars of Bitcoin a month,
[00:22:23] ODELL:
you know. So you have 10 k in the liquid wallet. No big deal. You Yeah. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Big deal. Like
[00:22:29] ODELL:
it's it's it's it's my my monthly budget for, like, groceries and my rent. But I like that auto swap concept. Yeah. I mean, in general, this is also what I've been pushing for in the Casio space. Yeah. It's like, you use Casio for convenience Yeah. But then move the user into a more secure setup automatically.
[00:22:45] Francis Pouliot:
Yeah. So we need to make choices for the user, and I know it's kinda confusing but defaults matter and, like, these things matter because one of the reasons why I one of the reasons why both Bitcoin is noncustodial in the first place is is because, you know, companies that are like custodial Bitcoin exchanges, they're gonna say, yeah, but we're encouraging people to withdraw to a self custody wallet, but they don't. They don't. They just don't. They just leave it in the self in the custodial wallet. So that's I I didn't want that to happen with liquid even though I think liquid is secure enough for me to be able to sleep at night. The auto swap thing, it's like, okay. Now I'm now I feel really comfortable because, like, I know that the worst that can happen to a user is that they lose, like, a million sats, which is, like, not a trivial amount of money, but also, like, you know, you'll you know, it's It's not the end of the world. It's not the end of the world. You can call your way out of that. Yeah.
So
[00:23:35] ODELL:
and Liquid has, And they probably won't anyway. Like, Liquid one of the biggest things Liquid has going for is just what, like, ten years, twelve years of uptime and reputation. It's relatively well organized also. Like like, Liquid is not it's not
[00:23:48] Francis Pouliot:
and there's nothing wrong with, like, a bunch of dudes doing that in their basement. There's nothing wrong with that. That that's cool. That's great. But but Liquid actually has you know, we have committees, we have boards, we have It's institutionalized. It's institutionalized and it's it's a little bureaucratic. It's a little annoying, actually, because it's it's kind of bureaucratic. And then you have Blockstream as a company which doesn't control Liquid, but Blockstream, I would say, is kind of like the secretary of of Liquid. So Blockchain, they will, like, you know, send you, you know, calendar invites to, like, the meetings and stuff like that, you know, and, like, they make sure, like, the functionaries and everything Yeah. Are are talking to each other when it's time to update the software and that kind of stuff.
But I'm not satisfied with liquid of course. Like liquid, I don't want bitcoin. I don't want liquid to be the model of bitcoin, of course. So, there is one thing interesting with liquid, which which I kind of like discovered is that when you're buying bitcoin Yeah. You should always, regardless of the amount, I think you should you should buy them on Liquid. Liquid has a very nice feature called confidential transactions. The reason we don't have that on Bitcoin is that it doesn't scale at all. It's it's a very large transaction in size, like, 6,000 bytes per transaction. But, of course, the benefit of centralization with liquid is also that, you get scale, you get low fees, which you obviously, that's the the the the reason why Bitcoin is is so amazing.
It's that it it's decentralized and that's why Bitcoin doesn't scale because if you scale Bitcoin by, like, increasing the block sizes, you centralize Bitcoin. Liquid doesn't have that Liquid is centralized by default so you can do stuff on Liquid that makes it scale. And a lot of people start using liquid and blocks are We'll just fucking increase the block size. You know, it's fine. It's it's it's a 15 functionaries. Will send an event invite and then you guys We'll just we'll just run this off fork. You know, whatever. We'll run the hard fork or whatever. It's fine. But it has confidential transactions. So imagine, what you wanna prevent when you're buying Bitcoin is you wanna you wanna you wanna minimize your your on chain traceability and it's it's not it's not like, you know, a fuck the state thing. It's also like I don't wanna get the kidnap thing and I don't want people to know how much money I have thing and I when I go to the store and I'm paying for coffee, you know which doesn't happen on lightning but like I don't want the coffee shop owner to like know how much bitcoin I have or if I buy like I don't know a used motorcycle at the store like like, I don't wanna spend from my stash and the guy seeing that I have, like, you know, 10 bitcoins in my wallet. Yeah. The example I always use is, like, your boss shouldn't know
[00:26:14] ODELL:
what you're spending your salary on Of course. And and and the guy you're buying a sandwich from shouldn't know your salary. Exactly. These are basic financial privacy primitives that you understand.
[00:26:24] Francis Pouliot:
So if you receive if you get paid with, either liquid directly or the bolt swap like lightning to liquid, you end up with funds in your liquid wallet, whatever. When you swap that to, your secure Bitcoin wallet like the on chain wallet, there is no more on chain trail Right. Between the funds that end up in your Bitcoin wallet and the funds that you got paid from. So it's kind of like the way that people would, like, swap to Monero or something. Right? You know, it's like, oh, yeah. I will. You swap to Monero and come back to Bitcoin. Well, that's kind of like what you can do with liquid. You can swap into liquid and swap it back. But in both situations, you have a like, it's not perfect. There's a timing analysis
[00:27:00] ODELL:
issue and stuff. Right? Like, they see
[00:27:02] Francis Pouliot:
Yeah. Maybe that changes as more people use it. But right now, as as there's less people using it. Well well, the thing with is with confidential transactions, you don't see the amounts on the liquid chain. So you can you can see that a transaction happens on liquid and Bitcoin
[00:27:16] ODELL:
within a Bitcoin block, kind of, but you can't match them because you can see the the amount of What I'm saying is Boltz does more volume, it's probably better. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And because if you're the only one doing it in Of course. Ten minute period or something, then it doesn't have they see a liquid transaction going to a bulk wallet and then you see because the addresses aren't blinded, only the amounts.
[00:27:35] Francis Pouliot:
The amounts and the asset type. Right? So if someone's you can't tell if it's USDT or if it's Bitcoin and you can't tell what the other is. Like Samsung's video. Whatever. Yeah. One of those shit coins on liquid. So liquid liquid is not perfect. The ecosystem is not perfect. There's, like, of of course, there's, like, points of failure, which is, like, you know, bolts is one of the two or three swap companies that are doing so. Bolt's open source. Can't you run this one provider too? I can definitely run the swap provider. Is there is that something you're considering? That's kinda I was I was a leading question when I said to you, like, like, your users would be not like, if Bolt goes down,
[00:28:09] ODELL:
then I'm stuck in liquid for I'm I'm I'm I'm confident there's gonna be a bunch of anonymous people running running. Yeah. And so do you imagine in the wallet you'll allow
[00:28:18] Francis Pouliot:
a switch provider? A 100%. I think that the reason why right now we are, just using Bolts. So right right now there's like one Bolts server by the phone which is the Bolts one. There well, there's two reasons. The first one is because, I love these guys, and they're making money from the swaps. Yeah. Right? And, like, Bold Bitcoin doesn't need to make money from swaps. And they've done a lot of proof of work. Right. Like, good operation. Yeah. Like, we make money from the exchange. So, like, I'm not I'm not trying to I'm not trying to, like, milk revenue from the wallets. I I make way, way, way more money on the exchange than anything I could do with the wallet. And the other reason is that it's not trivial to run a bolt server. Right? It's like it's it's it's just running a power lightning node is a full time job and and they're doing a great job. But definitely in the future kind of like And it's kind of the same LSP problem. Right? It's a capital constraint problem. It's a little bit easier. But it's Oh, yeah. You need you need you need you need you need you need liquidity to run, like, a bold server and you need to be able to move that liquidity automatically quickly. You need scripts. You need, like, engineers to, like, manage all that. So it's not trivial, but it's also not it's also not, like, magic, you know? It's not anybody that's motivated enough and that, like, is running a power lightning node, like, could could run like a bolt server. And in the future, of course, what you're gonna see is you're gonna see a bunch of different bolt servers and maybe even a bolt server discovery mechanism, kind of like that's one of the things that Wasabi did that I thought was, an ordinator discovery. And and by the way, just so you know, that was a bounty on Nasr that I paid for. Yeah. That was my that was my for your service. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that was my my bounty that actually, Cooks ended up implementing in Nasr, which is a coordinator discovery service, where, you know, when you start up the wallets, if you have people that are running coordinators anonymously over Tor, the problem is, like, how do you market your anonymous service without dock doxing yourself? Well, you can just announce it on and your clients can just get all these announcements. And you have the UX problem just like this coordinator do I use? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. From the user perspective. Yeah. Of course. And that's that's, because the coordinator can lie about whatever they're saying. You know? It's it's it's not what it's it's it's we're what we're doing is we are moving on the compromised scale to lower and lower and lower compromise while maintaining the UI. Lower trust,
[00:30:29] ODELL:
but pushing it as far as possible to the UX. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a problem we've had in space. It's either one extreme or the other. It's like either super trusted with good UX Yep. Or very sovereign cypherpunk and horrible UX. And we need a bunch of options in the middle. Yes. Yes. There is there is some there is some degree of compromise
[00:30:47] Francis Pouliot:
that you have to make, but what our job as so there's there's two types of cypherpunks. Okay? There's the there's the intellectual cypherpunks and there's the, like, commercializing cypherpunks. And that's why, for example, I love Grease, I love arcade, I love golds, is because, like, we we fucking we ship we fucking ship products. Shit toned crap out. We we ship products that people use and, you know, we change our products over time. We improve them over time. You wanna talk talk about ARC? Yeah. So,
[00:31:17] ODELL:
just, real quick, what did I have there? Bolts. Yeah. Let's let's talk about arc because so so we're talking about liquid. We're using liquid here, and two things have come two new projects have started shipping. And I'm right there with you that I from a from a product focus point of view, like, fuck hype. There's, like, there's so much bullshit hype in this space for, like, if for the last ten years, if I focus on every white paper that came out, I would have no time to actually get anything done. So I really only start paying attention to something when it's actually shipping, when it's actually usable. Right? And so the two things that have appeared is ARC and Spark. Yesterday, we had ARC Day here.
How are you thinking about those two things, and then how do you how do you think about those two projects in relationship with Bold and Liquid and going forward and whatnot? Right. So,
[00:32:12] Francis Pouliot:
Arc is the technology that gets me the most excited of of anything I've seen in Bitcoin since, look, I'm gonna say probably since lightning. I mean, there's other stuff that gets me excited, like silent payments, not and not for example. Like, there's there's stuff that we've done in Bitcoin, like, that that got me really excited. Something that okay. Before I get into ARC, actually, because once I get into ARC, I'm I'm gonna go deep into ARC. But, like, there's stuff like silent payments, I think is is a phenomenal piece of technology. I think what we're gonna do at Bull with silent payments is gonna be fucking dope. Silent what's the problem with painting with samurai?
The problem with painting is that they had a a there's there's two. The bit, I was gonna say. Yeah. The oh, fuck. I I forgot the name of the bit. The one that they were using was, like, on chain inefficient.
[00:33:03] ODELL:
And 47. Bit 47. And then the When there was a there was a transaction in and off return. Yeah. Timely. Right. In and off return that that set up the pairing between the two. So you had at least one extra transaction. And the Pay Name Server was a centralized server. The the naming so like you got a code Yes. Right? You had a one time use code which didn't require a server. Yep. But if you were gonna pay to, like, sleepy moose or something, that was actually centralized server that was connecting the code to the Yes. Oh, I remember. Just before we move on real quick, on the Bolt side, I think it's important for users to realize that the coolest part about Bolt is you're trusting them with uptime. So if they're down, then you can't make a transaction, but you're not actually trusting them with with funds.
If if the transaction fails, you don't lose any money. They never actually take custody of the funds. So both on demand atomic swap, which is really, really cool and very different from, like,
[00:33:56] Francis Pouliot:
shape shift or side shift Oh. Different instant A 100%. Seen in the past. Past. Both is fucking good because you have you have what's called a lock up transaction, which is basically like if the an atomic swap is is something that's like that that does not exist before Bitcoin. Right? That is a very new financial technology which is, you know, when you're buying drugs from someone, you know, you hand over the weed and I hand over you the cash. Like, we can't atomically swap swap the weed from the cash. Someone has to send the money first. Whereas an atomic swap, if one of the payments fails, the entire transaction doesn't fail. Like, both payments need to be successful. So so that's, like, that's great.
Okay. So silent payments, imagine if It's for back. Yeah. Imagine if we had a decentralized directory for silent payments. Right. Well, we have that with, you know, l n u r l. Yeah. It's Noster. Right. Noster is your directory. Yep. So, I'm not I'm not, like, I hope nobody does that before me because I won't be the first one to do that. But I did put it up on GitHub, of course, what you're gonna do. What we're gonna do is sign in payment directory on Master. Right. Right. Master enabled open contact book. What I wanna do is I wanna have the sexy fucking Cash App UX with Cypher for blank. And part of the sexy fucking Cash App UX is that I send money to at Odell. Right. Right? I'm not sending money to, like, SP 1212 or whatever. And I think specifically it's probably a combo of silent payments for on chain Yeah. And then bolt 12 for lightning. Yeah. So, and you can even put, like, a native arc You can put a native arc address in there. You can put, The the the the one thing that I don't like about Master is that, it's it's too lightning focused where people still use on chain. I wanna do basically, I wanna do on chain zaps. Right? So Alex Gleeson,
[00:35:34] ODELL:
the guy who booked it social for chain, and now he's working on, like, AI and Master stuff, he released a spec for on chain zaps. Well, did I But it's a reused address.
[00:35:45] Francis Pouliot:
Oh, well It's not a silent payments. It's a reused address. That's the thing. Like, don't don't we're we're past that, you know. We're we're past the thing with silent payments, is that it's actually hard to execute.
[00:35:56] ODELL:
It's really difficult to to implement. Right? That's why nobody has done it. Well, that's why I kinda like that's that's why I kinda like this reuse status because it's very simple. And also, like, for public zaps, there are there's no privacy anyway. So it's, like, not that worst privacy to go. You you you can have you can have that in my post, it, like, says France has zapped, you know, 2,000 zaps or something. Sure. But we can we can have zaps that don't reveal the TXID.
[00:36:20] Francis Pouliot:
Of course. Yeah. Right. That's strictly better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's strictly better. So that's what I wanna I I don't wanna I I don't wanna go back, you know. So I I want I wanna try to push it forward, but, it's hard. And that that's why, for example, I gotta I gotta give a shout out to Cake. You know, Cake,
[00:36:36] ODELL:
Shitcoin wallet, it has it has Litecoin, it has Monero, it has all sorts of crap in it, but they have shipped. They ship, and they have shipped silent payments and Yeah. I have Seth on the show all the time, and I get so much shit for it. He's great. I love these guys. But I've I've historically given them a ton of shit for Bitcoin stuff. I think it's a distraction. They are kind of stuck in the tech tech tech tech tech debt world where it's like Yeah. They already have Nano users in shit, so it's hard to get them off the platform. But on the Bitcoin side, they ship like crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so silent payments. The other thing that I've,
[00:37:07] Francis Pouliot:
I don't wanna get too deep in that because that that's gonna be a hard pill for swallow for a lot of people. We did actually do a very, advanced Bitcoin wallet backup protocol, which is loosely based on the Photon SDK concept, which came out about five years ago. Hey. Let's talk about it real quick. Okay. Because I think cloud backups are actually
[00:37:27] ODELL:
once again, you're pushing the UX sovereignty trade off bounce. Did you try the encrypted backup in bulk? Have you had It doesn't work on iOS.
[00:37:34] Francis Pouliot:
Oh, it doesn't? Alright. Okay. You didn't hear that freaks. We're gonna fix that. Okay. So I've been I've been meaning to give you that feedback. Alright. Okay. So here's the here's here's the TLDR. We wanna make something that's easy to use, that's secure and that's very difficult. If you if you encrypt a Bitcoin wallet backup with a user generated password, you will get backed. Right? So you think you have a good password, you think your passphrase, you think your big 30 nine passphrase is good because it's fucking 12 characters? It's not. It's brute forcible. It it it really is. So some kind of like an Apple user, anyone who has access to iCloud Yes. Just
[00:38:10] ODELL:
try a budget and passwords to OneWorks, has a computer do it. Yeah. That's what it brute force. Because if I if I take
[00:38:16] Francis Pouliot:
the physical possession of your encrypted backup file, there's no rate limiting Yeah. On the encryption. Like, it's not like the pin on your phone, like, where there's rate limiting. There's a secure element stopping. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. If I have the physical backup, I can brute force the shit out of it and I will. And there has been a research of of people brute forcing bit 39 and you think the the the amount of generating compute enough to to brute force a password is a trivial thing now. Yeah. Right? It's like And users it's known that users don't make secure passwords. They they they they most certainly absolutely do not. Yeah.
[00:38:50] ODELL:
So what we did is basically And then you also have the opposite side where then they make it too secure and then they forget it. Good. You have to lose access to it. Right? Because you have to remember that most people I mean, I'm not reminding you. I'm reminding you freaks. Most people lose bitcoin. They don't get it stolen. So you're always trying to find this balance. And, you know,
[00:39:07] Francis Pouliot:
okay. So all of this is on recoverable.com. Okay. I literally have a video explaining all of these. I spent a lot of time and, you know, that's the background that I came from is from the big one embassy where I dealt with both the really high IQ and the low IQ users. So I think I know the big corner and I know, like, the big one person really well. And, of course, that's the big problem is if your passphrase is secure enough, you're gonna lose it and if it's insecure you're gonna get a brute force. So how do you fix that? Well, what we did is and I didn't invent that but I think we did it way better is basically we derive a very large encryption key from the bitcoin wallet private key itself using bip 85 right so you start with the mnemonic and we derive the child key essentially another mnemonic from your mnemonic right it's you know, it's just red random entropy, and we encrypt the mnemonic with the key that we derived from the mnemonic. Right. Okay?
So you can upload your encrypted mnemonic to the cloud because that to to to brute force that encrypted file is the same energy required to guess your private key. So but, of course, the problem is, alright. So now your encryption key is another mnemonic. What do you do with that? Hey. So I lost my phone. Right. How am I responding? Okay. So that encryption key that allows you well, the fir first of all, it to restore your your your backup file, you just go in your drive, in your Google Drive, and, like, you download it. It's fine. Right? But how do you, decrypt it? Well, we created something. It's called a key server. It's it's it's called a recoverable server, and think of that as being like a password like a password manager. It's fully anonymous. There's no accounts. There's no email. There's no phone number. It it works only on Tor.
And when you are doing a backup, you give the encryption key to the key server and you authenticate yourself with, like, a very easy password. Right? And So the user is still picking a password, but it's the easier password because it's it's not The the password can be a six digit PIN. Okay. Right? Because, the recoverable server enforces So it's backwards the user basically is just pressing cloud backups Yes. And then just remembering a six digit PIN. Yes. They lose their phone, they reload the app on the new phone, they put in their six digit PIN Yeah. And the wallet's there. It's it's minimum six digit PIN, and we we prevent the most retarded six like, you can't One one one one. You can't do that. Like, we we we, actually, we have the thousand most common PINs Okay. And you can't use the thousand most common pins. Wow. Anything other than one two three four five six, 111111, 888888, like, you can do that. So, the key server and, like, the way we've we've I'm not gonna go too deep into the details, but the way that we've implemented it is really good. It's fully anonymous. There's no way that the key server knows who you are. There's no option to connect to it other other than Tor. If there doesn't work, then you can't use the recoverable server. The key here is the key here is
[00:41:54] ODELL:
if we're gonna actually talk about trade off model, you could technically, you can technically, work with Apple and and steal the backup. Right? So so so so we're talking about that that that recoverable
[00:42:11] Francis Pouliot:
and Apple recoverable and Google aren't working together, which is a strictly better than just trusting Apple or just just Google. Right? If if I was somehow able to convince Larry Page to give me access to the other Google Drive Or vice versa. Or or vice versa. The the thing is Google doesn't know,
[00:42:27] ODELL:
which recoverable server is being used or if a recoverable server is being used because you can use you don't have to use the recoverable server. You can export that private key and just do a regular backup without using the server. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, I think this is a great trade off. Yeah. It's not cold storage, but it's not supposed to solve cold storage. It's it's it's the first thing on the website is, like, this is not cold storage. Let me right. Yeah. Yeah. You do the framing really well. And I think I mean, look at the opposite not the opposite, but another trade off balance here is what Phoenix does. Where on Phoenix, they have, like, a quick and easy upload to iCloud button. Yeah. And what they say is, like, they make you check a box that's, like, the NSA and Apple can steal your money. Are you cool with it? Yeah. And, also, that threat model is probably good for the majority of people. Like, I think most people don't have Apple
[00:43:10] Francis Pouliot:
and and the NSA in their threat model, and this is significantly better than that. And and, you know, I I wanted to do something that's also a little bit better than Envoy's, like, magic backup, but they they had the right idea. They had, like, the right UX. I just think ours is, like, a little bit more, like, consider I think it's considerably more, more secure. And the thing is, like, what people act and you have to think about, like, okay, what do people actually do? Right? And the same thing with Liquid. It's like, what do people actually use? Well, they use one of Satoshi. Yeah. And what do they do with the backup? They fucking put the entire mnemonic. Dude, people put their mnemonic in LastPass. Or like Apple Notes is even worse than that. They put it in Apple Notes. They put it in Google Drive.
What they do is they put the mnemonic on on a piece of paper and they leave it in their office. What they do is they scribble it on a fucking post it and they lose the post it. Like, that's what they actually do. Right? People don't get hacked. Take a screenshot, keep it in their photos or whatever. And, like, what they do is they they leave it on Coinbase. That's what they do. Right? With a password.
[00:44:05] ODELL:
Alright. So let's talk about art. Alright. So why am I fucking sold? Real quick. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. And last but not least, if none of that suits you, you can just write down a classic seed phrase Yeah. Of course. Stored securely and do that as your full Bitcoin backup. You lose if you lose your phone, you just put in your mnemonic. Boom. Done. You got it. And that's why thanks for the issue actually. Like, that's I I wanted
[00:44:26] Francis Pouliot:
the, turn off the exchange. Right? So so if you don't wanna use exchange, actually someone actually did a PR. I saw that. Yeah. It was in hot Really quick. It was like one day or something. It was a random person from the Internet that did the PR. I've zapped him for it. Yeah. Sweet. So I want, you know, I actually do use recoverable for my hot wallets because I don't know. I got like $800 on it, and it's still convenient. And I uninstall wallets all the time, so it's, like, super convenient. I like cloud backups. But but but, you know, the thing is I I'm obviously not gonna fucking put my stash on cloud backup because because my stash is, you know, I don't know where it is. I don't have a stash. Just just so it worked out. I lost all my Bitcoins, except the ones in my recoverable backup, just $600. That's all all the Bitcoins I have. But, yeah, of course. So so you can see the general theme here. The general theme is, like, I wanna make I wanna make sure that's easy, for my mom. My mom's a Bitcoiner, actually. She's fucking awesome. I wanna make, something that's easy for my mom, but also that I can use. And I know it sounds cliche, but, man, you would be shocked at the amount of people that told me, like, you cannot do that. Even I remember, like like like, I got feedback from, like, the Bitcoin design guy, the people in design club, and they're like, you know, you're you're trying too hard to, like, you're trying too hard to cater to both the cyclocon server and normies. Like, you you have to pick one. You know, like, you have to just either you have to be Sparrow or you have to be Aqua. Yeah. I'm like, no. I don't wanna be either Sparrow or Aqua. I want I want to be both. There's a happy middle. Right. There there is a happy middle and it's called advanced options. You know? And it's like you had you pick a default path. If you don't know what you're doing, you click the buttons. Next. Next. Next. And if you know what you're doing, then you click the advanced option and then you go into the advanced, the advanced settings, you know? And, right. So At the realtor, let's talk about our Okay. So, so ARC, is a completely different set of trade offs than liquid or any kind of custodial or semi custodial or trust minimized model, because ARC has this very specific feature where you have unilateral exits from arc. So arc is a concept where you will, the arc server virtualizes UTXOs into virtual UTXOs. So it's like converting your Bitcoin into virtual Bitcoin, which only exists into the in in an arc ecosystem. So not unlike, you know, Cashew or Liquid or that kind of stuff. It's a you have a token of a virtual UTXO which is worth one to one is worth a Bitcoin UTXO.
But what ARC does is that, there is a pre signed transaction which allows you to claim the Bitcoins on chain non cooperatively with the the server in case the server goes down. You can exit whenever you want with that one. Yes. You can exit whenever you want. And, like, the server can't rub you if you exit and if they get, you know, arrested or seized. And what's the trade off is that it costs a lot of non chain fees? Yeah. So so so the the trade off is that you that, like, let's say that you have $5 on Arc and you do a new viral exit, like, you're gonna get robbed. And there there's another kind of, like, weird trade off in ARC where ARC has a pre confirmed transaction model, which is, like, you can have a in order to get the on chain guarantee on ARC, you need to include your virtual UTXO in an actual music Taproot output on chain. Yeah. And that's not free. Right? The ARC ASP needs to publish a Bitcoin transaction in order to update, I guess, the state's
[00:47:51] ODELL:
So how often are they doing this?
[00:47:53] Francis Pouliot:
Man, if I dude, Alex is gonna kill me if I explain ARC wrong, but, they they will do that, whenever they want.
[00:48:01] ODELL:
Well, then I'll have Alex on at some point. You know, I'm I'm I'm assuming
[00:48:05] Francis Pouliot:
something like, like my assumption Like, once a day or something? Like, a couple times a day or something like that. Right? And you don't end but you don't have to have on chain guarantee because if you you you can choose to not have the on chain guarantee. And in that case, the ARC server, if it colludes with the sender, can double spend you. Right? So so if you have the on chain guarantee, you can't you can't be rugged. If you don't have the unchain guarantee, you trust that the ARC server is not colluding It's not malicious. It has to be actively malicious. It's it's like a zero con transaction. Yeah. But, the thing with the zero con, but the ASP needs to, like, actively collude against you. Right? So for anything that's like alright. So let's say I'm a merchant and I'm getting paid, like, I don't know, a $150 for for for a dinner. Mhmm.
Is the ARC organization
[00:48:59] ODELL:
going to double spend me? Are they colluding with the person buying dinner? Right? Yes. I mean,
[00:49:05] Francis Pouliot:
again, like, no. You know, there's like there's like The probability of that happening is very low. It's it's very low. So so do do I really need that $150 to be on chain claimable in a Taproot music output? Like, no. But, you know, if I'm a large organization or if I'm a or a large merchant, that's fine. Like and, you know, I'm getting to the point when where,
[00:49:27] ODELL:
I might also be afraid that the art server goes down, you know. Like So but that's right. Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong. So that's why, like, there's a balancing act there where you do it once a day or something. Yeah. Right? So it's like, okay. There's a settlement. Right? Like, once a day is it kinda settles and then it can happen. Look, as the as the end user, I'm I'm I'm gonna pay for the settlement. Right? So so the ARC,
[00:49:45] Francis Pouliot:
I mean, I don't know what the pricing model, but you you can imagine that if ARC is paying the on chain fees, they're eventually gonna pass that on to the end user. They're not gonna it's it's it's expensive, especially if fees go up. If we're actually bullish on Bitcoin, fees should probably go up. I don't know about that. But And the there's another problem with ARC, which is that, the ARC server needs to lock up liquidity to kinda, like, front the, the Arc network. So, the your virtual UTXO will expire. It actually expires. And, like, right now, I think it's, like, fifty days or something or, like, sixty days or something. So you need to refresh your UTXO, and there is a liveness requirement to that. And that's why people say that you need confidence to make Arc better. Right. Because, It makes it cheaper.
Well, okay. And I I I I'm going above my pay rate here, because, you know, I'm I'm not I'm not a Bitcoin script guy, but my understanding is that Convenance would allow people to, refresh their v t x o's, without a liveness requirement, like, without your wallet being online. But the thing is that we can solve these problems with software that's not protocol changes. Right? So for example is, like, getting CTV as a software, while it might be ideal for ARC, it seems very unlikely that we're We have to assume we have to assume that it's not gonna happen. The the same way to be a Bitcoin is to assume no soft forks will happen. Yes. Exactly. If you base your business model on a soft fork, you're gonna get wrecked. You're gonna get wrecked. So the same thing happened with, Lightning. Right? So what happens if your node is offline where when there is a But Lightning, we got the software. Yeah. But but but it we did get the software for Lightning, but, we still have to have a watch tower. Right? So so if your lightning node goes offline and there is, what's it called? Anyway, there's, an exit transaction Yeah. Like, your your no Penalty transaction. Yeah. Punct like, your no needs to wake up. Right? And that's why Otherwise, your counterpart against take all your money. Yes. So that's why we have the concept of watchtower. So, like, one of the reasons why I am here specifically right now And also, like, you have to be offline for, like, two weeks or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean In practice, most people aren't using watchtowers, and we rarely ever see that attack app. That that's that's that's right. It's it's the same thing for ARC. Like, if you are if you're online, then you can refresh. But if you're not if you're not online when your v you say so expires, like, there is a likeness requirement. So, you know, stuff that that that we are going to work on is a a kind of like a watchtower model, but a a delegate refresh model. Right? Where maybe the wallet operator like bull, we can run a delegate server so that the user tell it's like conceptually, the user is telling us, like, hey. Like, these are my VUTXOs.
This is when they expire. Like, refresh them for me when it's time to refresh for me. Well, they are taking custody or anything. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So it's just like a service to help. So that's there's, like, some of these trade offs that are somewhat fixed or mitigated by a soft fork. We're gonna try our very best to fix them with with light. It sounds like they're workable without. It's it's it's it's it's workable without and, like, the the so so liquid is kinda like in liquid, you can't really be double spent. It's like there's, like, more finality, but there's no exit transaction. Right? Which is really bad that there's no exit transaction. Of course, it's bad. And that's the that's the That's the beauty of lightning. Like, lightning has a bunch of trade offs
[00:53:08] ODELL:
that make it kinda shitty UX wise, self custody wise. But at the end of the day, I can always escape off chain on chain myself without any permission or Well, look, like, lightning is
[00:53:19] Francis Pouliot:
a miracle. It's it's it's amazing. Right? It it it's amazing. And then, so there is another one called Spark. I and I'm gonna be honest. I didn't I didn't look into Spark because of the vibes. Yeah. It's purely vibes. It's purely aesthetics. Clients grow vibes. Yeah. It's purely aesthetics and also, like, Spark and Arcade. So Arc is the name of the protocol. Arcade is the one implementation that, you know, people who are familiar with Alex b and, Tierro and Cooks, you know, these are Legends in their own right. Fucking my my favorites.
One one of the reasons why I'm so into ARK is because there's people I respect in this space. There's, Roy from Breeze. Yeah. There's, Tierro, which I knew from the liquid days. Yeah. And there's Cooks.
[00:54:07] ODELL:
Right? And, and there's both. Yeah. And And Frizz. Just Cooks, like, has a very low profile, but he's most well known for BTC pay server. He was heavily involved in BTC pay server, and he's actually one of the co creators of Nostr,
[00:54:21] Francis Pouliot:
alongside Fiat Jeff. And what these guys have in common is they ship. Yeah. They fucking deliver. Like, Thiero delivers. Cooks delivers. Roy delivers. Bolts delivers. And coincidentally, we were all at Arcade Day. We're very excited about Arc. Right? So so so the the the the there is there is a let's fucking ship mentality with with Arc. To be fair, Spark also did ship. They Smart Smart They've been a a lot of people have underestimated. They've shipped like crazy. Yeah. And and and Spark is shipping in a kind of a corporate way where they are, like, going after exchanges and, like, they're It's more it's more polished. It's easier to build on right now. Spark bought a payment processor in order to get inside, like, the the kind of, like, fintech payment space. Oh, it helps when you get a $165,000,000 with a 16 seed investment. That, yeah, that that doesn't hurt, to to to be perfectly honest.
However, I and I don't wanna say anything negative about Spark. It's just,
[00:55:21] ODELL:
you know Well, I'll go out there. Like, the biggest negative right now is on the privacy side. They basically modeled Spark off of, Mercury layer, which is a state chain implementation, and then they stripped the privacy stuff out, and then they made it even less private. So, like, right now as it currently stands, you can kind of think it like of it like the Tron trust model, which ironically, a lot of people use Tron. More people Mhmm. Use Tron, quote, self custody than Bitcoin. But it's just with a single reusable address. So if you have someone's Spark address, if you pay them once on Lightning and you have their Spark address, you can see every transaction they've ever made Yeah. Including their current balance. Yeah. But on the alternate side, it's really easy to build. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And,
[00:56:04] Francis Pouliot:
one of the things that, ARC, I think, we will have to work on is, the privacy as well because, of course, the ASP, you can you can think of you can think think of ARC as, like, a private mental, which is the ASP's, private mental. So obviously the ASP, can see all of the VITXOs. You as a user, you can't see, like, the mental as ARC's private mental. Presumably, they couldn't make it public. So it's not, I don't think it's an improvement necessarily of privacy over Bitcoin in the same way that, like, liquid, it has a privacy improvement over Bitcoin even though Liquid also has a utility It's not a perfect analogy, but I call it like a custodial privacy model. You're trusting you're trusting a third party with your privacy. Yeah. I mean, people already trust electric surfers, like, random electric surfers and Internet. So but, you know, the the thing about ARC transaction is that they're essentially free inside the ARC network. Yeah. And, if they're free, I don't know. Maybe we can do CoinJones and ARC. I don't know. Like, it's it's still early. I'm I'm I'm confident that the guys involved in ARC and Arcade specifically are, are people that have worked on privacy technologies, I think I think we're gonna be able to solve that. So, like, the thing about the thing about ARC is that it has different trade offs, but it has some really, really neat features.
So is it going to replace liquid? Yeah. That's my next question. Is there a future where liquid gets removed from the bull wallet and arc gets replaced with it? There there payments? There's a 100% of future. There's a 100% of future where, the instant payments wallet, which is, like, the default one that the the user that that doesn't know what he's doing is the one that he's receiving funds into. Yeah. There is a future where that's in our wallet. Okay. And that and that future,
[00:57:47] ODELL:
might be close, might be far. Do you think the middle future is, like, you have both in there or is is there gonna be a world because that gets confusing too. I mean so there's, like Did I see a screenshot that you posted online that was, like, bull using ARC? Yeah. So What's going on there? Is that just testing? Or
[00:58:02] Francis Pouliot:
I mean, it's testing on on mainnet with real money. So it it it is I I I have ARC on the mainnet right now. So, of course, there are things that when you say, like, sleep at night, like, what makes me sleep at night. Right? There are I'm not comfortable, with with, like, onboarding you to ARC right now. I I I would feel bad because, the the UTXO expiry stuff is not is not really solved. There's no UX around the, unilateral exit. There's no UX around, the the delegation, delegated the refresh of the UTXO. So there's, like, stuff that's missing. Whereas on liquid, I mean, it's it's pretty Paul. I mean, liquid is this for for, like, ten years, so it's like, you know, give it some time. But I I think that future is, like, a lot closer than than than we think. And, like, okay, so there's, like, a wallet. It's called layers. Right? And layers is kind of like, we have all the layer twos and, like, you can choose your layer two, like but that's that's it's like, man, there's, like, this this, like, info thing in the wallet where I, like, explain the art, the liquid security. Imagine me explain, like Yeah. Choose your network. Like, here's the trade off. Lost the user when you're doing that. I I have to make that choice for them. And I have to make that choice for them. And I have to make that choice for them. And I have to make that choice for them. And I do see the default. Like, I love them, but, like, if if a user needs to watch it to our BTC sessions video, like, we've already lost the plot. Yeah. Of course. They should never have to do that. It's just very simple. So Volvik one is gonna have to decide whether the default is arc or liquid or spark or state chain or mercury or whatever it is. And I'm gonna make that decision based on what I think is right.
And I think right now, of course, liquid is the obvious choice. It's it's liquid is the now. Arc is the future. Yeah. And Arc also has other kind of, like, defy, implications to it, which get people really excited. Not me, really. Like, I'm more of a I'm more of a dumb dumb. Like, I like I just wanna pay for pay for my fruits with Bitcoin. I don't I don't need, fucking,
[01:00:00] ODELL:
sushi swap exchange. Right. Coins. So yeah. I'm, I want people to pay with Bitcoin and earn Bitcoin. That's that's what I want. And then I guess, like, the one thing that might be valuable, quote unquote, in the defies place is, like, lending stuff. Exactly. But then the question to me is always, like, at the end of the day, like, if I take a loan out of my Bitcoin, first of all, you should be very careful with it because that's how people get wrecked. But then second of all, like, I need dollars in my bank account. So there's gonna be centralized elements regardless. Well, there's so why are we pretending why are we doing this huge Rube Goldberg machine when you have tether in there, so you're trusting tether, and then you have your bank account in there somewhere, so you're trusting your bank account. I'm not gonna go too much into the questionable. I'm I'm not gonna go too much in details,
[01:00:41] Francis Pouliot:
but you can have very trustless, almost trustless stable coins on mark.
[01:00:49] ODELL:
You you can have that. You you you we we can we can make But is it what is that, like, is it, like, die or something? Like, it's, like, Bitcoin collateralized algorithmic stable coin? Kind of. It's like have a tendency to blow up too. Right?
[01:01:02] Francis Pouliot:
So think of the the fact that on ARC you have the unilateral exit from the ARC v UTXO. You can have a unilateral exit on Bitcoin from a stable coin. Right? That's that that that's something that ARC makes possible. That's cool. It is it is cool, and it's it's probably the only thing about ARC that's not Bitcoin that interests me. The other thing that that we can do on on ARC is, like, these kind of, like, trustless swaps between, like, you know, if you're if you're if you're trading Bitcoin for stablecoins right now Right. There's a centralized counterparty, but kind of like the bolts model where you can have a ton atomic swap. You can have an atomic swap between, a Bitcoin and a stable coin. Okay. That's not a.
But really, this is like it's like it's like icing on the cake. It's DeFi stuff. I'm not interested in it personally. You like the payments use case. I like I like the payments use case, and, I I I think ARC is the only thing that has come up other than Spark, which is, like, a fully new model. Right? Like, because cashew, fetti, liquid, it's the same kind of thing. Right? It's like you have a custodian or you have an entity which is guaranteeing a peg, whatever. It's like cash, liquidity, and liquid are like different shades of the same thing, whereas ARK is a completely new thing. I think a good comparison is like lightning. It's like fundamentally
[01:02:23] ODELL:
Yeah. A fundamentally innovative Yeah. New way for Bitcoin payments.
[01:02:29] Francis Pouliot:
Absolutely. And, like, as a as a fanboy of, you know, like, we Bolt Bolt was we integrated lightning in 2019 Right. But we launched it on May 2022. It took us three years to do that just because it wasn't ready. But, like, I I was, like, first to jump on lightning, first to jump on liquid, and, like, just out of, I guess, just out of ego, I wanna be the first one to to run on Arc. So so Arc actually does work in the bull wallet. Like, you can send from, like, the Bull Wallet, if you have access to the super user mode. And I I don't think I'm gonna give it to the I'm a little scared. There is a super user mode. If if you don't ask me nicely, I'll I'll give you the the codes. You have to tap certain things in the wallet and then access the Arc ARC wallet, but it it is reckless. ARC, it's it's reckless right now.
So so do it really is. So, like, do that with, like, pocket money. But, but yeah. So so it it does work, and, like, we have the best best engineers ever and, like, really excited to and, of course, like, not only do I want, Arc in the wallet, I want Arc in the exchange. Same thing with PageJoin. PageJoin is in the wallet right now. It's not in the exchange, and it's not for legal reasons at all. It's literally just because what we're talking about earlier, like, PageJoin v two is, like, reckless, and it just Yeah. It just kinda breaks. So it's it's it's fine if it's, you know, you and me testing a page line at a conference. But, like, if someone's buying, like, a $100 worth of Bitcoin, I don't want the page to fail. Yeah. Of course. But still, I don't think money would be a lot there's no risk of money. No. Money money wouldn't be lost. It was just kinda like No transaction.
Yeah. The the page one would like to get stuck and then there would be a fallback transaction. It was just, you know, kind of like piss people off, really. But, yeah, I I do wanna have, arc arc I wanna play with arc and and the bullet exchange and, like, make make that like, I want bullet point to be always, like, the the most technologically advanced exchange at the at the at the forefront. And, like, our goal really has always been, like, just just looking like the the be the model. Like, I wanna be the I wanna be I wanna be the model that, like, people emulate.
[01:04:36] ODELL:
Okay. I got a couple more topics real quick. Just real quick back to Liquid. It feels like Liquid could do a little bit more on the privacy side. You've been very, involved, like, in liquid network management and whatnot. Do you is there any interesting updates happening there on that side, or is it kinda stagnant and it is what it is? And we have confidential transactions and we should just be
[01:05:05] Francis Pouliot:
I mean, at with what we have. At the protocol level, I don't think there's much more that can be done, but there's Or not even the protocol of a I mean, there's there's nothing stopping a visabi Of course. There there's nothing stopping anyone right now from from doing coin zones and liquid. Like, they Well, there's no app. No one wants to do it. Right? I mean, I think no one wants to because liquid has a really funny thing, which is that, chain analysis doesn't work on liquid because chain analysis uses I mean, it could, but one of the main heuristics of chain analysis is,
[01:05:40] ODELL:
change detection. Yeah. And Specifically, like, around the mouse. Yeah. And if you don't see it because and the freaks know this, but but the way chain analysis works and chain surveillance works is all probability analysis, and they're trying to figure out when ownership changes. Yes.
[01:05:53] Francis Pouliot:
So when you don't have the amounts, it makes it much more difficult. It it makes us really, really, really hard. But if you're, like, sending max amounts, then you can still there's no change. It gets becomes a little bit obvious stuff like that. There's there's no there's no no. You're right. Yeah. So if you're doing max amounts and and also there's a new thing. It's like there are a lot of page ones on liquid. Yeah. There's a tons of page ones. Yes. So page join does do. It even better improvement on liquid than it does on chain because the amounts are blind. And the reason why there's so many page ones on liquid is that all the USDT to Bitcoin swaps happening on liquids are used, using a, like, somewhat non disclosure model called site swap, and every swap is a page on a liquid. Right? So a lot of transactions are liquid or actually page on. So the common input ownership heuristic, which is the core of gen analysis Do you think Boltz will do that as well? Do page joins by default? Because maybe that's all we need. Maybe that makes a huge upgrade. It's up to both. Okay. It's up to both. What I will say what I will say is that with the advent of page join one point zero point zero, many things become more more possible than than were before like page one was was definitely a little reckless and then there's also page one d three which is an exaggeration of page one which is multi party page one which is you know effectively a coin join in a way, and we could drop in that on to liquid too, Right? Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course. That's one of the cool parts about liquid is it's very similar to bitcoin. It's it's it's like it's like a it's like a fork of bitcoin where you can just play around with it, you know, and since it's centralized, we can update it without without too many worries.
But no. Like like, the thing about page one that really so I have a I have a specific, very, personal and very visceral hatred of chain analysis, of some chain analysis companies for it's a long story I'll I'll I'll share one day. I I really dislike chain analysis. And one of their motivations for me, to to to make Page one a reality is that I actually believe that the chain analysis companies are are bullshit. They're they're they're phonies, they're fake, they're voodoo. They're doing a lot of bad things, but that's the worst part. Right. They're they're astrologers. And what they end what they end up doing is they do a lot of false positive where where Bitcoiners who are innocent are, have evidence against them on shame that they did something wrong where they they did it. They they didn't do anything wrong. And the change It's probability analysis. And, like, when it's 60% probability,
[01:08:18] ODELL:
the chain of the analyst firms, they, like, pretend it's a 100.
[01:08:21] Francis Pouliot:
They pretend it's definitive. They say it's 60% probable. Right? But that number is fucking pulled out of their buttholes completely. Right. They're, like, 10%. Right. And I you know, it's like you either you either did it or didn't do it. Right? It's like crime is bling. You know what I mean? You're not 60% guilty, but the problem is the justice system is taking Cheninossa's word for it because it has partly because based on the common ownership, common input ownership heuristic. So if we destroy that heuristic, then is any chain analysis evidence ever admissible in court after that? Because if the if chain analysis is there's an argument it shouldn't be admissible already. Right. But but even more so. Right. Because, you know, chances can say, like, we have we have some solid reasoning behind our report, and I can be like, well, your solid reasoning is based on this realistic, which is no longer correct. So all of your fucking analysis falls apart. So page one is really cool really cool in that in that regards. Also, a really neat thing about page one is that it allows for anyway, I'm such a fan of page one. It's so great. It allows for passive consolidation of Bitcoin. So when you consolidate when you have a lot of small UTXOs in your wallet, that's not a good thing because in the future, if the the fees go up, you will be paying transaction fees for every little UTXO you have in your wallet. So you wanna consolidate. Right? But people don't know that they should consolidate, and they don't know how to consolidate. Less UTXOs are better fee wise, but worse privacy wise. Exactly.
Exactly. So that's why, by the way, with the auto swap, like, the I think that a million sat UTXO is, like, the right trade off between privacy and and I I think the million SAT UTXO is, like, it's it's, like, should be the default right now. But if you are You're saying push it, but I like it. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's it's sounds nice. A 100 a 100,000 will probably always be economically spendable. Yeah. Like, at least the next next ten years or so. Yeah. That's true. But, like, a a a million UTXOs is a is a thousand bucks. Like, if the coffee shop owner knows that you had a thousand bucks, like, everybody has a thousand bucks. You know what I mean? I agree. It's a good check. So if you have UTXOs in your wallet, the way that you would consolidate is by sending those UTXOs to yourself. Yeah.
Send all to myself. Yes. But if you have Pejoint in your wallet and I am sending you Bitcoins, you are consolidating passively without realizing it as a receiver. Yeah. Which is fucking awesome. Because as a receiver, I'm contributing an input Yeah. And then you're contributing an input Yeah. And then I get one bigger input of it. Yes. Yes. So that's that's the love page on. But I guess you contribute two inputs. I contribute two inputs. I contribute one input. Right? And then we do We we we we can program page on to do whatever we want. Like, the bull Bitcoin wallets could have consolidation mode. Right? Where you you know what I mean? Like like, okay, let's say you have 10 inputs. You have 10 UTXOs, but you only need to contribute two.
You can choose to contribute all of them in that page on it. Right? And we can have the consolidation mode as a social based on the network fees at the time. You can say, hey. If the fees are less than this amount Well, that's why I think it may be particularly helpful on the liquid side because fees are so fucking cheap. It's like 33¢
[01:11:30] ODELL:
or something. Yeah.
[01:11:31] Francis Pouliot:
And if you're consolidating Bitcoin, maybe, you know, you can consolidate it inside a swap. Right? So you have tons of small UTXOs you wanna consolidate. You're not gonna gain backwards privacy because those once the coins are consolidated on chain, like, we can all see that they're linked to the same person. Yeah. Unless it's a big one. Unless it's a big one. But, if you consolidate into a swap, you know, you you consolidate into liquid and then you swap it back to Bitcoin, like, that new Bitcoin that you got is completely unlinked. Very unlinked, let's say, to to the original to the original Bitcoin that you got. So, like, so, you know, like like,
[01:12:09] ODELL:
coin drawing is not coin drawing is not the only game in town. Yeah. Right. No. I agree. As and especially with confidential transactions, I think it could be there's a lot of cool things you can do on the liquid side without protocol change. Yep. That my mind is really racing now that there's actually a very usable liquid wallet. Because that was the one of the main things Yeah. Stopping liquid usability was there was just no good user facing stuff and now we have It's a never effect, man. And the thing is, like, it's it's kind of exponential because what happened is
[01:12:36] Francis Pouliot:
Bolt's Breeze, Bull, and, to some degree also the Aqua team and some other teams kind of, like, all gravitated towards the same conclusion at the same time, which was around the time, by the way, of the Bitcoin at Planis, the the conference in in Madera where we all kind of, like, got together and we were like a lot of the builders were like, this is this is what we're gonna do. This this is the model that so so there's, like, the network effect of of liquid is growing, but the network effect of arcades, is is also growing really quick, man. I Yeah. You'll have a look at that there's there's at least,
[01:13:12] ODELL:
at least six Bitcoin companies right now that are building an arc. And I think the fact that you're the a lot of a lot of wallets, including yourself, are using lightning as, like, kind of the interoperable layer. It is. You said that you didn't it doesn't you don't have to fight the network effect as much because you can drop an arc where liquid is, and at the end of the day, they're still paying and receiving from lightning. So that I have I have a question for you. The so the biggest trade off with using a liquid enabled lightning wallet is is small we haven't really talked about it. It's small transactions because you do have to make that on you have to make the liquid the liquid transaction. So, like, sending, like, I think a lot of bots, maybe yours even included, like, you you can receive a payment under a thousand sats, which, you know, people for whatever reason love sending, like, 3 sats payments, so you have that, but the second piece is you don't have lightning address support, how do you think about that, like, I will email support? We will. I'm gonna I'm gonna make it happen. I'm just gonna ship it. I'm gonna fucking ship it. I'm gonna Is there is there a concern that, like, how does that work? Are you gonna be running basically a server that is, like, holding liquid addresses or something? Like, how does that work? Yeah. It's gonna be directory server. Right? So so,
[01:14:21] Francis Pouliot:
and that is not as trustless, is there there there's there's more trust assumption involved there, but what we can do as, like, a company is we can run a lightning server and basically, you give us, like, a liquid, you know, I guess, an ad Either either an x club or one address. It's probably better if it's just one address. I think address reuse is probably better than x public to be perfectly honest. So Couldn't couldn't I was thinking, like,
[01:14:54] ODELL:
every time I open the wallet
[01:14:56] Francis Pouliot:
You can send it out. Or send you, like, a 100 addresses or something. Yeah. Yeah. We we can we can lock 100 addresses. Yeah. But basically, what would happen is, like, I would create a swap between the sender and your address Yeah. As the receiver, and we would be hosting, like You give it to Bolt's And yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And instead of creating a lightning network invoice with my node as the server operator, I get a a I create a swap with the bolt server. It's not it's not as fully trustless as a proper bolt swap. There's, like, a tiny amount of time in in between that swap where a rug can technically happen.
[01:15:30] ODELL:
Not fully You could probably man in the middle. You could give a liquid address that you control so that I control. Yeah. There there's, like, I need to Which I think is fine. I I need to get a little deeper into that. I just want people to be able to pay me at a [email protected],
[01:15:43] Francis Pouliot:
you know. Know? Like, it's just a convenience thing. And if I need if I need more security, then I'll give them an actual invoice. Well, the thing the thing on Liquid is, like, we actually dropped the fees on Liquid. Like, is Yeah. We can just do things on a centralized network, which is great. So the fees on on Liquid is $0.01.0.01 sat per v byte
[01:16:04] ODELL:
and a It's like 33 sat of transactions.
[01:16:09] Francis Pouliot:
For a confidential transaction, which is, like, 20 times bigger than than a than a than a regular transaction, I think we're talking about 3,000 vBytes. Therefore, yes, 33 SaaS. For a regular transaction, it's zero. Right? So so a regular transaction on liquid that's not confidential, is basically free. And the reason why we don't do swaps, under a thousand sets is because a swap transaction involves two on chain transactions and two on chain confidential transactions. So, like, bold Bitcoin swaps using bolts, which we could, like, not use confidential transactions if you wanted to, but I think it's worth it. It's not using very, that will be 6,000 bytes. Therefore, 60 sets. Right? 66 Sats around that, which is, like, I don't know, man. Like, we could yeah. I mean, it's it's, like, 6% of a thousand Sats transactions. So it's, like, not great. But there's nothing stopping us from doing, for example, silent payments on Liquid. We could do that. Yeah. We could we could we could do a bunch of things. Right? We can just do that if we want to.
So, definitely, like, at least on chain, I wanna have the the on chain zaps with, because the the UIpes that we want is, like, yeah. I I pay at Badel and then at Badel is a Master handle. So my Bold Bitcoin wallet, which I very obviously, we're gonna have Monster in the Bold Bitcoin wallet Yeah. For for many reasons. I first of all, I wanna have, private group chats Yeah. In in both Bitcoin Yeah. Because when you are paying someone, you are also talking with that person. Right. Whether because let's say I wanna pay you, I mean, you're gonna be like I may be like sending address. Right? It's a human condition. It's like what? It's like 80% of p two p trays are happening on, like, WhatsApp or something. Yeah. Of course. People just want to chat. Yeah. Of course. So so you want that to be confidential. There's also cool things. Obviously, the next frontier is multisig. Right? So I've never been a individual multis multisig, fan, like like multisig yourself.
Never been a fan. But I think now with the technologies that that are arriving with mini scripts, now is the time to, like, have a refresh at the MultiSync experience. And what I really wanna do is something that I use personally. My my greatest shame is that I use the BitPay wallet. Copay. Right? It used to be called Copay, now it's just called BitPay Yeah. For multisig because The original multisig wallet. The original multisig wallet because both Bitcoin, we have some of our budget is in Bitcoin. Right? So, you know, like, when when made x does these crazy, like, stunts, you know, that that that for both Bitcoin, you know, we have a we have a a budget for we we call it that we can just do things budget, and it's it's a it's a multisig wallet. And and in order to make sure that nobody does anything too retarded with that budget, we have a multisig. And why don't you Sparrow for those? Because you want mobile? It's because we we spend a lot of we we do it all the time. Right? So you want the convenience of mobile? Yeah. Exactly. I get I get, like, a notification on BitPay app, which is, like, Natex wants to spend this amount of money to, I don't know, rent a tank. Oh, and it just gives you an it gives you an in app notification. Yeah. With a message. With, like, literally, like press, like, approve. Yeah. Exactly. Like, Francis, I want $5,000, I'm gonna rent a tank Right. For for a video shoot or something. And I'm, like, approve or deny. So I want that over white noise. Yeah. I want that over in Austria. 100%. Right? I wanna do other things in in in Austria. I want White noise will be perfect for that. I want it's still early, but it'll Like, I wanna be able to communicate with the the bull users. Yeah.
I can't right now. As as the bull bitcoin operator be because I've said this push notification, basically. Well, probably push notification. Well, basically, what I can do is I can create a nostril as a very small I don't I don't wanna compete with with social media stuff. I wanna use nostril as a back end. A contact foot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like as a back end communications network for contacts and for stuff like that. But there's nothing stopping you or us, which obviously we will do, to generate a master key pair and you're connected to, you're automatically following whole Bitcoin or you're automatically collected to to my relay or something like that. And I'm saying, like, guys, we have an update or something like that. And and you, I'm not pushing anything to you. You're following me, I'm not sure. Right. Automatically And you're opening the app and you don't even check your And and and in the app, we can just say, like, hey. Any message that's coming from this end pub Just say displayed on the displayed on the homepage. Right? Because we this end pub is the, like, emergency bulb equipment and, like, there's a bug. We need to update stuff transact whatever it is. Or, like, you know, Indians have arrived, whatever it is. It's important. It's important to be able to communicate with the users in a secure way. Yeah. So so not not not not not their art, silent payments, all that kind of shit. I love it. Like yeah.
[01:20:49] ODELL:
Yeah. Okay. I don't, like, kept you too long already, and you have some obligations, but, you're not allowed to leave without what's your opinion on, core thirties opera turn? Oh, well,
[01:21:04] Francis Pouliot:
it's such a I have the only correct opinion, by the way. So I have I have the I've noticed that about most of your opinions is how you feel about them. And and, it's it's it's it's it's so nuanced. In order to be correct, you need to have a lot of nuance. I, I don't wanna burst anybody's bubble, but running knots, will not it's it's it's there there's there's there's a certain fatality, fatalistic aspect to my opinion, which is there's nothing we can do really to prevent spam, and that was proven by, you know, the kind of like the joker of Bitcoin, like Peter Todd, you know, who, like, created Liber Relay and he was like, like We'll relay all the things. Oh, we'll relay all the things. And then before before that, there was a kind of gentleman's agreement in Bitcoin that, you know, we have two mechanisms.
We have the policy one and we have the consensus one. And the policy one, you can call it a gentleman's agreement, like, and if someone decides to not be a gentleman, you can't force the agreement on them. Whereas the consensus layer, of course, is the hard rules. That's the hard rules of government. It's the hard the hard rules, of course. And, you know, I, I have mixed feelings about Bitcoin Core, and I I kinda feel it's kinda weird because I've been in the early camp of, like, you know, there's some things about Bitcoin core, the the process, because bit like, there's something about the Bitcoin core process and, of the Bitcoin core inner circle that I don't like. Yeah.
There's definitely, like, a a click a little clicky 100%. Yeah. Aspect to it and, you know, not everybody's PRs get merged and it it helps the difference. Yeah. If you want to get sh things shipped in Bitcoin core and you're part of the inner circle, you kind of, like, get you know, you're not automatically white listed, but, you know, your your stuff is So there's a fast track. Yeah. You're fast track. There's, like, things that that I don't like. Specifically about Bitcoin core 30, by the way, which really sucks is they removed that was the thing that I that pissed me off the most. Really niche thing. They removed support for legacy wallets. They removed support for importing Bitcoin. Bitcoin addresses and private keys into a Bitcoin core wallet, which means that we will not be updating to Bitcoin core 30, because, part of Cipher Note, like our open source Bitcoin back end relies on that to work, relies on legacy wallets, so that kinda sucks.
[01:23:29] ODELL:
But Bitcoin's fine. Bitcoin's What was their argument for that?
[01:23:34] Francis Pouliot:
I I'm assuming it's because They built cleanup or something? Yeah. Something is that they don't they don't wanna work. They don't wanna maintain it. Yeah. And, it's fine. Like, I don't need them to make I can run, you know, 29.2, forever. Yeah. 29.2 introduces the 0.1 stats per, or the the lower side bite limit. You like that change. I fucking love it, man. I fucking love it. Like, if the miner is, there's you know, I don't wanna have an artificial price for for Yeah. That's that's communism. You know? That's what we have in Canada with the price of fucking maple syrup. You know what I mean? There's a an artificial price for on it or something like that. So I'm I'm happy that the fees are fees are getting low. But the thing is, like, if I had never heard of the Bitcoin core upturn, debate, it would still have not affected my life. Right?
So and, of course, like, I don't I don't like spam. Of course. I don't want it to be on Bitcoin. I don't like shit coins. I don't like I don't I don't want some people want the shit coins to be on Bitcoin. Like, they specifically want that. Like, I don't want that at all. Same. I'm a monetary Bitcoiner. You know, I think the Bitcoin, blockchain is not a general purpose database. It's it's a financial it's a monetary transaction database. It's like what I want it to be. It's money. It is money, but unfortunately, it's not up to me to decide what it is. It's up to the the the the consensus, to decide. And short of a soft fork or a hard fork even maybe, there's nothing we can do. And Is there even a really a fork that could stop it? I mean, you could obviously move off return, but you still have shit coins in Bitcoin. I mean, there would certainly be a whack a mole game where, you know,
[01:25:12] ODELL:
after we do let's say we do some You can't but you can't really do whack a mole soft forks. So the soft forks are super difficult to pull off. Correct. And and I think people have gotten a little bit spoiled. We haven't had that many soft works, but people have gotten spoiled with the soft works that we have. Yeah. They don't realize that, first of all, there's no really way to know if there's consensus ahead of time. Yeah. You're kinda winging it. You feel like there's consensus. Yeah. And if a significant portion if there isn't consensus, you could have an inverted chain split after the fact. Yeah. Of course. Of course. Which would just be chaotic. It'd be fine. Everyone would be, like, you could Yeah. Go to sleep and be fine if you have have your funds in self custody. But if you're running businesses and stuff, it'd be a fucking pain in the ass. Yeah. Yeah. So, like,
[01:25:50] Francis Pouliot:
aesthetically, I'm kind of like, I wish there was no spam. Yeah. I wish there was no nothing. And then, you know, I I also I also feel like there's something wrong with the Bitcoin core process. But at the same time, like, Bitcoin core does ship really nice things, and a lot of the technologies that, we're going to need I mean, I'm not I I I I'm I'm getting closer to the belief that that some form of confidence is is something that I would like to see on Bitcoin. And the thing is, like, I I've never been, like, fully closed minded against covenants. I just I was just, like, you know, like, kind of like with Taproot, it's, like, with Arc, now it's like, oh, you can actually use Taproot to be so so so Arc is a Taproot thing. Right? Yeah. Taproot is and I was like very skeptical of Taproot because like, no nobody is fucking using Taproot. Like, only the shareholders are using Taproot. It's fucking retired. Why did we even need Taproot? Yeah. The thing is Bolt actually uses Taproot for the the refund path, which is great. So Bolt, actually implemented Taproot in a really nice way. So I was, like, actually, Bull Bitcoin is now a Taproot user. Right. And with ARC, ARC is just full Taproot. Right? So I'm like, okay.
What the guys on ARC have done, it it's kinda like, okay. Right. So despite opening up some attack vector, we did gain arc with Taproot. Right? And then, with And with the attack vector, it's, like, cheaper spend. Right? Yeah. Yeah. There was the Inscriptions exploit, which was always possible, quote, quote, but obviously made Significantly cheaper. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It made made, the the barrier to spam, difficult or the barrier to spam was, like, reduced, let's call it, with with Taproot, somewhat, not not fully, but somewhat. They could they could have spanned anyway on just segway without that route. But, so I think, like, we core core can and this is the kind of thing that that core can ship that that very few other people can ship. Like, let's say, to ship Convenience onto Bitcoin is something that's very, very tricky, and even the core devs and and the Bitcoin devs in general, like, don't agree. And And when we implement it, it's it's hardcore shit, man. It's like it's and so having having, like, hardcore protocol crypto experts able to deliver that thing is is is nice.
So that could be upgrading to Bitcoin $4.30 until we've fixed.
[01:28:25] ODELL:
And what's funny you gotta do work on the cipher node side to remove the legacy wall. It depends on Yeah. And you know what's gonna do? Some time to do that. I mean, I was gonna do that anyway.
[01:28:33] Francis Pouliot:
Eventually, I was gonna we were gonna switch server stuff eventually, but, you know, yeah. That's that's the essence of my opinion is that, it's, it's over. The the the the the the gentleman's agreement was broken, and that's what it is. Yeah. We,
[01:28:50] ODELL:
I think I'm pretty much completely aligned on your opinion, and I've talked about this just at length, for almost over a year now. Just been a massive DDoS in my time, but, look, it's good that people care about Bitcoin so much. Yeah. I think we died based on apathy. Apathy is probably the single biggest risk to Bitcoin. Just real quick, so when we launched Open Sats, this was the main concern we had was the there was a very, I had maybe it's too strong of a word, but it felt kind of like incestuous funding path and core group. Mhmm.
And we thought Open SaaS could do something different and be more independent and be more transparent and be more open. Yeah. And and I think we've really accomplished that goal, we've provided over 300 grants, like really just try to broaden the pie. Yeah. And a lot of that the overall majority of that isn't for protocol. Yeah. It's for us, you know, we're the largest supporter of BTC pay server now. Mhmm. We've done a lot of cashier support, tons of different mobile wallets, pay join. Yeah. We help them start up their their in their non profit. They have their own non profit now, and that's one of the things we wanna see, like, a thousand flowers bloom. But for better or for worse, we found basically massive success, and now we're the heavyweight in the room. Yeah. And so I'm getting a lot of flack, which is fine, like I understand, you know, people and and to be clear, the way we designed OpenSats is that I'm just one vote of nine votes. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I can't unilaterally push things through. But do you have any there's a new narrative of just, like, funding any developers this way is bad. Do you have any, like, recommendations or opinions on how we proceed with OpenSats? Like, what's the best path for Bitcoin going forward on that front? I think OpenSats failed a very much needed
[01:30:42] Francis Pouliot:
narrative and an operational space, which is that the protocol devs were, like, they're to improve Bitcoin, you you you you can do other types of software which is not protocol development, like like the ones that you named. And before OpenSats, I think, like, the the the Bitcoin cord if you wanted to to fund the Bitcoin, you would just fund Bitcoin cord devs and what OpenSats is is fund the application layer, which is the one that is that I'm that that I'm most interested in. You know, I wish there was more private companies Same. Doing that. Right? And, like, I I will say that that's one of my biggest, my pride is that, like, all of the software that we do, is is funded by us. Right? So, like, the Bolt the Bolt Rust library, which is used by a bunch of, these, these these new wallets, that's us. Like, we maintain a bunch of open source software.
You know, PayJoin, I I paid my debts to work on PayJoin. I paid, I financed, you know, I I did, like, little private grants, so, like, joinster and, like, a bunch of shit like that. I wish a lot of more people would do it, but, apparently, they don't. I am actually, like, kinda, like, a little concerned that, that I'm competing with OpenSats for, like, employees. So so but, you know, it is what it is. Like pay them less than people realize, though. Yeah. Yeah. We we intentionally don't publicly say what our highest grant amount is because people would just apply for the highest, but it's not that high. Yeah. I mean, it's not it's not that high, but, you know, Bull Bitcoin is also not like a VC funded company. So we, like, you know Yeah. But that's a that's an ethical I like the choice. Yeah. I think a lot of the a lot of Bull Bitcoin devs,
[01:32:26] ODELL:
take a pick at working on Bold Bitcoin. They take a look. Also say, like, look. My dream is similar to your dream because I actually have to go out there as a volunteer and try and raise donations Yeah. Which is not sustainable. Yeah. And I think it's much more sustainable, and I'm a capitalist to have private companies doing this. And that's where the ten thirty one side comes in. Right? Because we're one of the few Yeah. VCs that actually fund full open source stack companies like StartNine Yeah. Yeah. Or mempool mempool that space Yeah. Primal. Mhmm. And the dream there is, like, actually sustainable, profitable businesses that contribute to open source. Yeah. And I would just say on that front too, while I really respect that you are completely bootstrapped operation, as a Bitcoin focus open source VC, there's also not that much money there. No. No. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. For sure for sure. It's not a light spark. It's a 165,000,000
[01:33:13] Francis Pouliot:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Scene around. And and to be very clear, like, I love what you guys are doing. And, you know, fuck the haters. Go they they could go fuck themselves. It's, you know, if you're not if you're not building anything, your opinion matters very little to me. Right? And, like, you know, you guys are not specifically building shit, but you're you're you're you're enabling builders. Yeah. And, like, you know, there's a really good example, for example, is page on. Like, page on is a great example where, like, we contributed, a little bit to it, but for pay joins to go from v zero to v one to v two to the release of v two to go to v three, that's a four to five year effort, in total that, required, I don't know how many people. And to go to v three is gonna also take, like, you know, two to three to four, like, almost like full time people to, like, to get there.
And even for a company like Bullbick, it's like it's above my budgets to fund the entire page on the thing. Like, I can't, I can't, you know, I have other employees, you know, that I have to take care of. So a lot of these things like, like kind of like wouldn't happen and even stuff like, like arcade and like, you know, who knows how they're going to make money. It's, it's, it's, it's very, very experimental. But I, I, I think that, you know, there is money to be made in open source software. We're very fortunate at Bold Bitcoin that we have, you know, the only profitable business model in the space Yeah. Which is like Bitcoin brokerage. Buy, sell Bitcoin. Yeah. Buy or sell Bitcoin. Charge a reasonable fee. Yeah. Exactly. And like, there there's there's others but like, you know, there's others but, you know, mostly that's that's the one and then so, and then we we use I use open source as a marketing tool. Yeah. Right? So and it's not just for that, obviously. Like, I do it because I I do it because, like, out of out of ego, out of pride, and out of, since there is a sincere there is a sincere desire, to to help Bitcoin and and and to do something. And it's where we hold the line. Right? Sort of software is where we hold the line. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's foundational. It's it's the it's the core of the freedom movement. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. And it it's also it's also really fun, to be perfectly honest. Like, as someone who's dealt with governments and banks and, you know, running a Bitcoin exchange is just an endless and endless stream of problems. Like, every day I wake up, I open my phone and it's just like problem, problem, problem, problem. But, like, what I've I have found with open source is this really satisfying, purely creative, unrestrained like, Like, you can do anything in open source development, and you don't have to you don't need to ask anybody's permission. And, like, the sky is the fucking limit. Like, software is magic. You know? The more I the more I discover open source software, the more I'm just, like, like, happy. You know? So working for me, working in open source software is what allows me to swallow the shit of, like, the fiat world of running exchange is, like, knowing that at least half of my day is gonna be interesting, which is the half of my day where I'm working with the open source desk. I love it. Francis, this is great. Let's do this more often? Yeah. Totally, man. Okay. Yeah. Get some upstairs. Thanks so much, man. Alright.
[01:36:22] ODELL:
Freaks. I hope you enjoyed that. Hopefully, I'll get some more in person rips while I'm here in Lugano. Maybe I won't. Not sure. But, stay on the stack sets. Peace.
What is up, freaks? It's Odell here. I got another in person rep this time from Lugano. Audio only. We got a good friend here, absolute legend, Francis. How's it going, Francis? I'm doing great, man. Thanks for having me. It's It's a pleasure. I've we haven't, have you ever been on Dispatch, dude? I've been I've been on
[00:00:20] Francis Pouliot:
the the Dispatch with Marty, I think, like, I don't know, like, six years ago or seven years. Oh, Marty's show. Right?
[00:00:26] ODELL:
I don't I don't remember. Oh, no. We did it together in 2019. At the Bitcoin conference The first week going on. San Francisco. Yeah. Oh my god. Okay. So we've gotten a lot done since then. Oh, yeah. That day was the day Marty found out he was having his first kid. I remember and then we got trashed on the roof. Yeah. I think we got trashed before the rip also. We were there. Yeah. During the rip too. And Bitcoin topped at 13 k that day. Yeah. And I told everyone to smash buy. And for two years, we were under 13 k, and everyone said I was a fucking idiot. Oh, well, who's the who's the idiot now? Now we're just a humble 10 x guy since then. Okay. So I got a couple topics for us. Let's just dive right in.
First topic, you guys released the new self custody bull Bitcoin wallet. Yep. Fucking awesome. I've been playing with it. So, I mean, to the freaks that haven't used it yet, first of all, you can just you can download it in your favorite app store, Bull Wallet. Just search Bull Wallet, or you can go to wallet.bitcoin @wallet.bullbitcoin.com. But, what is the wallet? Why should people care?
[00:01:33] Francis Pouliot:
Yeah. So the wallet is, typical classic Bitcoin wallets is, is, is the core of it. So we're using BDK under the hood, the Bitcoin dev kit. I've been involved with the Bitcoin dev kit project for like almost like three years. Yeah, they're awesome. They're really awesome. What makes the bolt wallet I guess special or different or part of like a new wave of bitcoin wallet, which is by the way like one of the hot topics of this conference it's like that we call them like the next generation wallets is that actually originally I wanted to do an LDK wallet. Originally my goal was to have a full blown like Phoenix style, fully self custodial, like lightning note on your phone wallet. So that's actually how we started. Right. And I built we started to build on on LDK and then I got kind of like I got a little bit black build on lightning because of that because, like, lightning does a lot of things, like, really well. Like lightning is is really phenomenal, but there are things that you simply cannot abstract away with lightning.
And you know, I don't have to go into the details, but it's, it's, it's got to do with, the liquidity management, right? Like the backup stuff, that's fine. Like running a node on your phone is fine. It's doable. It's just the light, the liquidity management. And, and, and also there's like, it's not just technical, there's like economic components to it. Like, let's say, all right, I'm a developer. I want to launch a wallet and to find an LSP, of course. Right? And imagine, like, you have a thousand users with a thousand, dollars worth of of channels. You have, a million dollars of liquidity that needs to be locked up by an LSP doable.
But once you get to a 100,000 users or a million users, you're talking about a fuck ton of money. Anyway The cap the capital management's Yeah. So, you know, I'm like, alright. So the LDK wallet's not happening. So what if Really, Phoenix has been the only one who's too close to pulling it up. Fucking legends, man. Because what they're doing is, like, really, really, really hard. And also, I I I honestly didn't think that we were gonna be able to do what Phoenix did. Like, they're they're exceptionally good. And they're I mean, their nose, I I don't know how many millions of dollars is on their node right now. I'm pretty sure it's the biggest node on the network. I think Async is probably the biggest node. But I just feel like that's an important thing to just,
[00:03:49] ODELL:
iron in here because if the freaks are like me, I've run a ton of lightning notes, twenty four seven lightning notes in my life. I still run a couple mostly because, I need, like, twenty four seven uptime or whatever for certain tasks including, getting SATS. They support the show with SATS. But my go to wallet on a day to day basis has been Phoenix. Right? I take a single coinjoin UTXO, drop it a big a big UTXO. It works better with bigger UTXOs, drop it into Phoenix, and then I just make my payments as I need to. And now that the bull wallet's out, I find myself sitting there, I'm like, which one do I use going forward? Mhmm.
Well, there because there's different it's a different trade off balance, but it it's filling the similar need for me, right, which is just I wanna top up my eSIM or I wanna send a quick lightning payment, and I could easily just open the bulldog and make the payment. So
[00:04:39] Francis Pouliot:
So Phoenix works now. The reason why I got black billed is actually because I was at the El Salvador conference in 2023 exactly during the first ordinal, fee wave and I'm onboarding a guy to Phoenix in El Salvador. And I'm like, I'm gonna send you your first payment. Right. Right? And then what Phoenix does is called the just in time channel. They will open a channel at the same time as the guy's receiving money. So I'm sending the guy $5. Instead of an unpaid transaction. Yes. But the fees were like a 175, I don't know, SaaS provider or something. So the fee to open the channel It was like $4 or something. No. Way more. Yeah. Way more. Like like $30 or something like that. Right? So so like the the pure Phoenix model works well economically,
[00:05:22] ODELL:
when the fees are low. I guess even right now where fees are basically zero it's still like 60¢ or something. Yeah yeah
[00:05:29] Francis Pouliot:
yeah so I'm like you know in my bed in the middle of the night and I'm just like oh my god like are we gonna have to do a custodial wallet? I'm, like, freaking out because, you know, for for people who, like, don't know me, I'm, like, you know, mister self custody. Right? So, like, you know No no custodial lever. No no custodial lever, and that's always been, like, my my North Star. It's, like, self custody at all costs. Like, everything I do is to support or facilitate self custody. And I'm like, how the fuck we're gonna do that? So that's when the idea of using the liquid network came in. Right? So, and and this and I think a lot of people have the same idea are pretty much around the same time. And that same time is literally, like, the ordinals span wave. So it's it's not a coincidence, because we all kind of, like, felt the same, felt the same kind of, like, problem that I was having with with the just in time, like, LDK, like, full lightning node model.
And, yeah. So the idea was alright. So let's build a Bitcoin wallet that has a, Bitcoin wallet inside and a liquid network wallet inside. The thing with the Liquid Network is that, there there's no there's nobody else using it. Right? So there's no merchants using the Liquid Network. They're all using the Lightning Network. So somehow we needed to find a way to move value between the liquid network and whatever other wallet the person was using. And that's where this company came in called, Bolts. So Bolts, my fucking favorite company in Bitcoin, they're absolute legends. They're absolutely amazing. So what these guys did is they built an API that creates a non custodial atomic swap between various networks Yep. And Lightning. Between Bitcoin and Lightning, between Liquid and and Lightning, between Rootstock and Lightning, and now between arc and lightning. Yeah. Alright. So so liquid was the first iteration. So People don't realize rootstock is actually decently used by degen's in Latin America. Like They found that out when we went to Brazil. Rootstock has some
[00:07:32] ODELL:
think that was, like, something that I heard of, like, six years ago. It's a thing. It's yeah. Yeah. It's a thing. It's real.
[00:07:37] Francis Pouliot:
So yeah. So bull Bitcoin, it's a a bitcoin wallet and a liquid wallet. And then when you send and receive, there's a non custodial atomic lightning swap. And that's really It's like the moon, but with liquid. That's exactly that's exactly it's like it's like moon, but with liquid and without the retarded backup that, you know, system that Moon invented. Right. Just as a seed backup. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, for us, we are obsessed with standardization also, in the wallet. So even here, one of the reasons I'm here is to help kind of, like, figure out stuff with ARC to make sure that all the ARC wallets that are popping up, like, really quickly are are on the same standard. So we have we're here specifically to also partly build standards for ARC. We'll talk about ARC in a second. Let's continue on this wallet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and then my goal you know, so, like, people know, man. I'm an OG. I'm like a cypherpunk. So the the the wallet that I I I build a product that I wanna use. Right? So I'm I'm at this point in my Bitcoin journey where I've done a lot of stuff and now I want to do something for me. Like, the wallet is a very ego it's a it's a fully ego driven project. Right? So first of all, I want to build something for me that I really want to use personally.
I also kind of consider it to be almost like, performance art or something like that or like, I I want that to be like what people remember before. Like, like, I want that to be my legacy because the Bullbick One exchange will close one day, you know. It's it's a fiat business. It's literally an exchange is a fucking it's the most fiat business ever. All they do is deal with that. Hyperbitcoinization. We're not touching fiat. Yeah. Of course. And, like, an open, an open source bitcoin wallet will hopefully, like, outlast me and at the very least the code will always exist and people in a in a thousand years are probably gonna, you know, I'm gonna probably inscribe a copy of the source code on my tomb or something, you know, it's gonna be my legacy.
So I wanted it to be kind of like very easy to use, but also super cyberpunk. So some of so like the concept of the wallet is to is to make it sexy and and UX friendly, but also have cyberpunk features inside it. Right? So, from, you know, my goal with the wallet, for example, is to is for it to be kind of like a Sparrow substitutes for mobile. Right? So imagine Sparrow is kind of like a gold standard of the desktop wallet because it gives you control. Yeah. We like Sparrow. Right? So so Sparrow is amazing because you can control everything. You have very good coin selection and labeling. You obvious of course you can connect your own nodes and of course with Sparrow you can connect your hardware wallet. Yeah. Right. So it's got the coin selection, it's got the hardware wallet, it's got your own nodes, they They have privacy features. They had Whirlpool in there.
You can do operations with descriptors. You can update your port card for so it's like it's like a massive it's like a software individual toolbox. That's what Sparrow says. Piece of software that is my my all my projects and companies Yep. And my family relies on. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Additional piece of desktop software. Uh-huh. Just like the best. It doesn't come No. No. No. Exactly. You know, and, like like, you have, like, Electrum, which is kind of there too, you know, but I personally use Sparrow just just because it's it's I've it showed Sparrow to my mom, by the way, and, she she finds she finds it very intuitive. Like Well, that's what's cool about it. It's like for a power user, it has literally everything you'd ever need. Yeah. But for the average person, they can figure it out and use it. And that's what I wanna do for mobile. That's what I wanna do for mobile. And that's the goal of the bull bitcoin wallet.
And, you know, so some of the things that kind of, made us stand out, like, we were the first wallets to integrate, PayJoin v two. We were kind of like the reckless version of PayJoin. It's gonna get way better. Like, Pay PayJoin the the new version of the last, like, stable version of pay join, like, is is coming out. It it was pretty reckless to do that on mobile, to be honest. But it worked. Like, pay join actually did work.
[00:11:26] ODELL:
We have, like The pay join piece is still a little bit rough around the edges. Right? It it is. I mean trouble making It is. Yeah. Even in, like, test environments.
[00:11:33] Francis Pouliot:
And it's also incompatible with, like there's, like, breaking changes to the page on protocol, but we've literally just, they launched the version one point zero point zero of page on, like, last week. So page on is is is basically going to become stable and standardized starting basically now. So for example, the other companies that, like, Cake, for example, and Bull, Cake is the other wallet that makes us PayJoin. Yeah. Right? We were, like, on incompatible versions of page joins, so you we can actually Oh, so is that what you're working? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because page join kept making these changes as well. The wall would detect that it was a page join compatible wallet. Yeah. It wouldn't make the transaction. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And and and page join also has, like, a server component to it. And same with Wasabi. I was Wasabi is the other one that supports it, I think. Right? Yeah. But Wasabi I couldn't get it to work with Wasabi. Incompatible versions. Okay. Fair enough. So it was it was it was a little it was a little reckless. But yeah. So But it doesn't matter. It's not like any funds are lost. It just the transaction doesn't work. Right. Right. And, like, of course, I also wanted to have a privacy first wallet. And it's, like, people when people think about privacy wallets, they think, like, oh, so you don't have coin join? No. No. There's, like, there's other aspects to it. Like, so no push notifications, like zero data collection whatsoever.
[00:12:45] ODELL:
There's, like, all sorts of That's where Phoenix really falls flat. They do a lot of, like, the Yeah. So so we Edge Dev, iOS, Android checks where they're doing, like, push notifications,
[00:12:55] Francis Pouliot:
cloud backups. Yeah. No. And and the the mobile front dev team, specifically the ones that work on the wallet are are very strict. Very, very, very severe in terms of, like, dependency on on, like, servers and stuff like that. So, of course, like, now, well, now what we have. Okay. So what we have, so I have I've actually been using it for, like, two and a half years. Okay. We're on version 6.2 now, but we, we came to a point where I was, like, comfortable promoting it. Right? I mean Right? I mean, we we actually got, like, 10,000 users just through, over the last two years literally not try like, literally not trying to to to push it because it was you know, there's bugs. Right? There's there's, like, no there's no, like, catastrophic lose your money bugs, but, you know, there's, like, shitty shitty UX bugs. Right?
But now we reached a point where we're like, okay. We're we're ready to to start to start, like, commercializing it. So, yeah, what we recently announced was the the iOS launch. IOS was actually, very hard. Like, very hard, spiritually even. It took us a long time a long, long time to get iOS Apple to approve it. I have, like, 250 emails back and forth. Experience. Yeah. I almost gave up. Yeah. I almost gave up. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:21] ODELL:
So what else is there there to say about this? I think look. It's pain in the ass working with, Apple on the App Store. But if you want, like, an actual mass massively used wallet Oh, you gotta meet people where they are. And it needs to be on both because Yeah. From, like, a from a recommendation point of view, I mean, you've been doing this as long as me. Yeah. As soon as I have to ask, like, oh, we're using Android or iPhone and then recommend a different wallet for them, it breaks apart. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Being able to say, like, download primal For sure. It just doesn't matter where it is or download bull wallet Mhmm. Is is absolutely key. Okay. So what I wanna talk about real quick is, so you're using liquid, it's like moon, the freaks know moon because I was showing moon like crazy, where I rest and but instead of with moon, I I rest, it sits on the liquid network. Mhmm. And then you're doing on demand swaps.
First, a comment. I really like how in the wallet you say you have the on chain wallet which is secure you call it secure bitcoin and then instant payments which I think is just immediately intuitive it's like okay I'm not keeping my life savings in instant payments, I'm keeping that in the secure wallet and so I really like that framing. I think that you don't have to explain it to the user. A lot of people have passed it, like, called it, like, checking versus savings account. Mhmm. But where we're going, most people don't know what checking and savings accounts are. Right? So I think that's a really good frame. So good job on that. Liquid is something that for probably, like, ten years now, I've been I've I've I've, fallen into the hype cycle of liquid maybe four or five times. We're like, this is the moment that liquid is actually gonna be used.
I feel like this might be it. Yeah. But I've been there before. The the big issue that people have with liquid, we've talked about this in the past, and I just wanna be clear with it, is it is a collaborative custody model. So it's a multisig federation. You can't you can't leave on demand. You you need permission to leave. You need if the bolt is down, you can't get out of liquid. How do you how do you think about that as like, you said, you know, you wanna reduce dependencies? Yeah. Does that keep you up at night? Like, do you have a bunch of users that are in liquid? Maybe they're not able to get out. How do you, like what are the mitigations there?
[00:16:36] Francis Pouliot:
This is this is probably my my favorite topic to discuss in in the entire world, and, I'm just gonna do a quick shout out to Roy from Greece, which which also is is is a is a very forward thinking person in terms of rethinking custody versus trustlessness. Right? So, technically, liquid is self custodial. Like, on a technical level, like, you own the LVTC assets. Right? But of course it's not you're self cussing the irony. It's like it's not trustless you know it's kind of like you know if you have if you have a tether on your I don't know whatever fuck like if you're in wallet right yeah and trust wallet you are self cussing tether but of course tether, the organization is the one at the end of the day, which is guaranteeing the peg. Right. Right. And the peg is guaranteed because tether will send you a fiat wire transfer in exchange for your USDT.
Yeah. At some point, there is there is a a a redeemer of last resort. Right? I would go so far as to say, like, it's impossible to self custody, like, Tron or something. It's it's it's Because or or because it's just a centralized network. So at the end of the day, there's trust in Justin Sun. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And and there there's there's certainly not trustless. So the way that I see, liquid, I see it as a Bitcoin stable coin. Right. Kind of. Right? So so it's a stable coin. It's another coin which is backed one to one by Bitcoin and the job the job of the liquid federation is to guarantee the peg. Right. It's not and they guarantee the peg by custodying an amount of bitcoin which is equivalent to the amount of liquid bitcoin, right, in a multisig.
So from a strict technical perspective, they're not custodying your bitcoin. They're guaranteeing a one to one peg between your liquid Bitcoin and and that is And uptime. They're guaranteeing peg and uptime. Right? And there actually is a legal distinction also here, where I don't think legally that liquid is a custodian. I think legally the the liquid network for and and that has to do with, you know, KYC regulation and how to, like, avoid that. So liquid actually, like, somehow has a has a very clever way to avoid being, there's no k y c a m l on liquid. Like it's, it's a blockchain, right? Quote unquote.
But, the thing that I really liked about liquid is that it exists. Right. And that it works. Right. So, it's it's really easy to to criticize something and say that another model could be better, but the other model doesn't exist whereas the existing model works. And the way that I see it, there's so okay. So there is a scale here. Right? There's two axis. There's the y axis and the x axis. And the way I see it, there's a UX and compromise matrix. Right? And by compromise, I mean compromising on on core cyclical values of self custody, of privacy, of trustlessness, and permissionlessness. Right? So typically what a company will do is that they will compromise on the ethos in order to gain UX points. Yes. Right? That's and it's it's almost like and think think of, like, the the coin bases and the big pays and all of these, you know, people, they they they very quickly compromise to gain, marginal UX points. They're the UX. Yeah. Right? Whereas I I have and there's, like, these dots on on the matrix where I think what what what I wanna do is I have a certain level of compromise over which I will not walk the line, and I need to stay under this compromise level, but I wanna increase my UX points under this compromise level. It's hard for the freaks to see that because I'm literally waiting with my hands right now and I'm like trying to like trying to make you imagine a chart. But, but liquid is, for me, orders of magnitudes more secure than, like, was it Satoshi? Right. And, you know, orders of magnitude more secure than cash in, orders of magnitude more secure than FEDI, and now and it exists and it works. Okay? So, I'm not Maybe not FEDI.
I mean, technically technically what the what the FEDI rate. This product How it's implemented the federate. Right? So the thing is how it's implemented actually makes a difference. Right? So technically, you could have you could have, like, a FETI that has 15 very professionally run Right. We just don't have that yet. We just don't have that yet. Right? So again, like, liquid exists. But, I obviously my fear with using the wallet was that people were accidentally gonna confuse liquid with Bitcoin. Yeah. It's it's really hard to to not cognitively overwhelm a person, but also not mislead them at the same time. It's very, very difficult. Yep. Right? It requires a lot of finesse in in UX. And thank you for saying, I actually spent a lot of time trying to figure that one out. It was good. Instant payments versus secured Bitcoin. And, you know, like, a common balance, but also two separate balances that I have to look at. It's it's it's tough. So one of the things that I did, is the auto swap. Yeah. I think the auto swap is is the fucking greatest feature of the bull bitcoin wallet. As soon as the auto swap is a million sats, by default, and then as soon as you reach a million sass on liquid, the next time you open the wallet, it will auto swap into the secret into bitcoin on chain. So that there's, like, a mechanism to prevent people from accidentally Interesting. Because you're not you're not really supposed to have more than $500 in a liquid wallet or like a thousand or maybe like a couple thousand. If you're I don't know. Depends on what you're spending, you know? Yeah. Depends. What it it should real the hard part is is it's like a percentage of your stack. Yeah. Of course. Of course. So it's on a case case by case basis. Right? And, like, you know, if if you're like a rich guy, you know, and you're spending Bitcoin, you know, I I spend, thousands of dollars of Bitcoin a month,
[00:22:23] ODELL:
you know. So you have 10 k in the liquid wallet. No big deal. You Yeah. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Big deal. Like
[00:22:29] ODELL:
it's it's it's it's my my monthly budget for, like, groceries and my rent. But I like that auto swap concept. Yeah. I mean, in general, this is also what I've been pushing for in the Casio space. Yeah. It's like, you use Casio for convenience Yeah. But then move the user into a more secure setup automatically.
[00:22:45] Francis Pouliot:
Yeah. So we need to make choices for the user, and I know it's kinda confusing but defaults matter and, like, these things matter because one of the reasons why I one of the reasons why both Bitcoin is noncustodial in the first place is is because, you know, companies that are like custodial Bitcoin exchanges, they're gonna say, yeah, but we're encouraging people to withdraw to a self custody wallet, but they don't. They don't. They just don't. They just leave it in the self in the custodial wallet. So that's I I didn't want that to happen with liquid even though I think liquid is secure enough for me to be able to sleep at night. The auto swap thing, it's like, okay. Now I'm now I feel really comfortable because, like, I know that the worst that can happen to a user is that they lose, like, a million sats, which is, like, not a trivial amount of money, but also, like, you know, you'll you know, it's It's not the end of the world. It's not the end of the world. You can call your way out of that. Yeah.
So
[00:23:35] ODELL:
and Liquid has, And they probably won't anyway. Like, Liquid one of the biggest things Liquid has going for is just what, like, ten years, twelve years of uptime and reputation. It's relatively well organized also. Like like, Liquid is not it's not
[00:23:48] Francis Pouliot:
and there's nothing wrong with, like, a bunch of dudes doing that in their basement. There's nothing wrong with that. That that's cool. That's great. But but Liquid actually has you know, we have committees, we have boards, we have It's institutionalized. It's institutionalized and it's it's a little bureaucratic. It's a little annoying, actually, because it's it's kind of bureaucratic. And then you have Blockstream as a company which doesn't control Liquid, but Blockstream, I would say, is kind of like the secretary of of Liquid. So Blockchain, they will, like, you know, send you, you know, calendar invites to, like, the meetings and stuff like that, you know, and, like, they make sure, like, the functionaries and everything Yeah. Are are talking to each other when it's time to update the software and that kind of stuff.
But I'm not satisfied with liquid of course. Like liquid, I don't want bitcoin. I don't want liquid to be the model of bitcoin, of course. So, there is one thing interesting with liquid, which which I kind of like discovered is that when you're buying bitcoin Yeah. You should always, regardless of the amount, I think you should you should buy them on Liquid. Liquid has a very nice feature called confidential transactions. The reason we don't have that on Bitcoin is that it doesn't scale at all. It's it's a very large transaction in size, like, 6,000 bytes per transaction. But, of course, the benefit of centralization with liquid is also that, you get scale, you get low fees, which you obviously, that's the the the the reason why Bitcoin is is so amazing.
It's that it it's decentralized and that's why Bitcoin doesn't scale because if you scale Bitcoin by, like, increasing the block sizes, you centralize Bitcoin. Liquid doesn't have that Liquid is centralized by default so you can do stuff on Liquid that makes it scale. And a lot of people start using liquid and blocks are We'll just fucking increase the block size. You know, it's fine. It's it's it's a 15 functionaries. Will send an event invite and then you guys We'll just we'll just run this off fork. You know, whatever. We'll run the hard fork or whatever. It's fine. But it has confidential transactions. So imagine, what you wanna prevent when you're buying Bitcoin is you wanna you wanna you wanna minimize your your on chain traceability and it's it's not it's not like, you know, a fuck the state thing. It's also like I don't wanna get the kidnap thing and I don't want people to know how much money I have thing and I when I go to the store and I'm paying for coffee, you know which doesn't happen on lightning but like I don't want the coffee shop owner to like know how much bitcoin I have or if I buy like I don't know a used motorcycle at the store like like, I don't wanna spend from my stash and the guy seeing that I have, like, you know, 10 bitcoins in my wallet. Yeah. The example I always use is, like, your boss shouldn't know
[00:26:14] ODELL:
what you're spending your salary on Of course. And and and the guy you're buying a sandwich from shouldn't know your salary. Exactly. These are basic financial privacy primitives that you understand.
[00:26:24] Francis Pouliot:
So if you receive if you get paid with, either liquid directly or the bolt swap like lightning to liquid, you end up with funds in your liquid wallet, whatever. When you swap that to, your secure Bitcoin wallet like the on chain wallet, there is no more on chain trail Right. Between the funds that end up in your Bitcoin wallet and the funds that you got paid from. So it's kind of like the way that people would, like, swap to Monero or something. Right? You know, it's like, oh, yeah. I will. You swap to Monero and come back to Bitcoin. Well, that's kind of like what you can do with liquid. You can swap into liquid and swap it back. But in both situations, you have a like, it's not perfect. There's a timing analysis
[00:27:00] ODELL:
issue and stuff. Right? Like, they see
[00:27:02] Francis Pouliot:
Yeah. Maybe that changes as more people use it. But right now, as as there's less people using it. Well well, the thing with is with confidential transactions, you don't see the amounts on the liquid chain. So you can you can see that a transaction happens on liquid and Bitcoin
[00:27:16] ODELL:
within a Bitcoin block, kind of, but you can't match them because you can see the the amount of What I'm saying is Boltz does more volume, it's probably better. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And because if you're the only one doing it in Of course. Ten minute period or something, then it doesn't have they see a liquid transaction going to a bulk wallet and then you see because the addresses aren't blinded, only the amounts.
[00:27:35] Francis Pouliot:
The amounts and the asset type. Right? So if someone's you can't tell if it's USDT or if it's Bitcoin and you can't tell what the other is. Like Samsung's video. Whatever. Yeah. One of those shit coins on liquid. So liquid liquid is not perfect. The ecosystem is not perfect. There's, like, of of course, there's, like, points of failure, which is, like, you know, bolts is one of the two or three swap companies that are doing so. Bolt's open source. Can't you run this one provider too? I can definitely run the swap provider. Is there is that something you're considering? That's kinda I was I was a leading question when I said to you, like, like, your users would be not like, if Bolt goes down,
[00:28:09] ODELL:
then I'm stuck in liquid for I'm I'm I'm I'm confident there's gonna be a bunch of anonymous people running running. Yeah. And so do you imagine in the wallet you'll allow
[00:28:18] Francis Pouliot:
a switch provider? A 100%. I think that the reason why right now we are, just using Bolts. So right right now there's like one Bolts server by the phone which is the Bolts one. There well, there's two reasons. The first one is because, I love these guys, and they're making money from the swaps. Yeah. Right? And, like, Bold Bitcoin doesn't need to make money from swaps. And they've done a lot of proof of work. Right. Like, good operation. Yeah. Like, we make money from the exchange. So, like, I'm not I'm not trying to I'm not trying to, like, milk revenue from the wallets. I I make way, way, way more money on the exchange than anything I could do with the wallet. And the other reason is that it's not trivial to run a bolt server. Right? It's like it's it's it's just running a power lightning node is a full time job and and they're doing a great job. But definitely in the future kind of like And it's kind of the same LSP problem. Right? It's a capital constraint problem. It's a little bit easier. But it's Oh, yeah. You need you need you need you need you need you need liquidity to run, like, a bold server and you need to be able to move that liquidity automatically quickly. You need scripts. You need, like, engineers to, like, manage all that. So it's not trivial, but it's also not it's also not, like, magic, you know? It's not anybody that's motivated enough and that, like, is running a power lightning node, like, could could run like a bolt server. And in the future, of course, what you're gonna see is you're gonna see a bunch of different bolt servers and maybe even a bolt server discovery mechanism, kind of like that's one of the things that Wasabi did that I thought was, an ordinator discovery. And and by the way, just so you know, that was a bounty on Nasr that I paid for. Yeah. That was my that was my for your service. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that was my my bounty that actually, Cooks ended up implementing in Nasr, which is a coordinator discovery service, where, you know, when you start up the wallets, if you have people that are running coordinators anonymously over Tor, the problem is, like, how do you market your anonymous service without dock doxing yourself? Well, you can just announce it on and your clients can just get all these announcements. And you have the UX problem just like this coordinator do I use? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. From the user perspective. Yeah. Of course. And that's that's, because the coordinator can lie about whatever they're saying. You know? It's it's it's not what it's it's it's we're what we're doing is we are moving on the compromised scale to lower and lower and lower compromise while maintaining the UI. Lower trust,
[00:30:29] ODELL:
but pushing it as far as possible to the UX. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a problem we've had in space. It's either one extreme or the other. It's like either super trusted with good UX Yep. Or very sovereign cypherpunk and horrible UX. And we need a bunch of options in the middle. Yes. Yes. There is there is some there is some degree of compromise
[00:30:47] Francis Pouliot:
that you have to make, but what our job as so there's there's two types of cypherpunks. Okay? There's the there's the intellectual cypherpunks and there's the, like, commercializing cypherpunks. And that's why, for example, I love Grease, I love arcade, I love golds, is because, like, we we fucking we ship we fucking ship products. Shit toned crap out. We we ship products that people use and, you know, we change our products over time. We improve them over time. You wanna talk talk about ARC? Yeah. So,
[00:31:17] ODELL:
just, real quick, what did I have there? Bolts. Yeah. Let's let's talk about arc because so so we're talking about liquid. We're using liquid here, and two things have come two new projects have started shipping. And I'm right there with you that I from a from a product focus point of view, like, fuck hype. There's, like, there's so much bullshit hype in this space for, like, if for the last ten years, if I focus on every white paper that came out, I would have no time to actually get anything done. So I really only start paying attention to something when it's actually shipping, when it's actually usable. Right? And so the two things that have appeared is ARC and Spark. Yesterday, we had ARC Day here.
How are you thinking about those two things, and then how do you how do you think about those two projects in relationship with Bold and Liquid and going forward and whatnot? Right. So,
[00:32:12] Francis Pouliot:
Arc is the technology that gets me the most excited of of anything I've seen in Bitcoin since, look, I'm gonna say probably since lightning. I mean, there's other stuff that gets me excited, like silent payments, not and not for example. Like, there's there's stuff that we've done in Bitcoin, like, that that got me really excited. Something that okay. Before I get into ARC, actually, because once I get into ARC, I'm I'm gonna go deep into ARC. But, like, there's stuff like silent payments, I think is is a phenomenal piece of technology. I think what we're gonna do at Bull with silent payments is gonna be fucking dope. Silent what's the problem with painting with samurai?
The problem with painting is that they had a a there's there's two. The bit, I was gonna say. Yeah. The oh, fuck. I I forgot the name of the bit. The one that they were using was, like, on chain inefficient.
[00:33:03] ODELL:
And 47. Bit 47. And then the When there was a there was a transaction in and off return. Yeah. Timely. Right. In and off return that that set up the pairing between the two. So you had at least one extra transaction. And the Pay Name Server was a centralized server. The the naming so like you got a code Yes. Right? You had a one time use code which didn't require a server. Yep. But if you were gonna pay to, like, sleepy moose or something, that was actually centralized server that was connecting the code to the Yes. Oh, I remember. Just before we move on real quick, on the Bolt side, I think it's important for users to realize that the coolest part about Bolt is you're trusting them with uptime. So if they're down, then you can't make a transaction, but you're not actually trusting them with with funds.
If if the transaction fails, you don't lose any money. They never actually take custody of the funds. So both on demand atomic swap, which is really, really cool and very different from, like,
[00:33:56] Francis Pouliot:
shape shift or side shift Oh. Different instant A 100%. Seen in the past. Past. Both is fucking good because you have you have what's called a lock up transaction, which is basically like if the an atomic swap is is something that's like that that does not exist before Bitcoin. Right? That is a very new financial technology which is, you know, when you're buying drugs from someone, you know, you hand over the weed and I hand over you the cash. Like, we can't atomically swap swap the weed from the cash. Someone has to send the money first. Whereas an atomic swap, if one of the payments fails, the entire transaction doesn't fail. Like, both payments need to be successful. So so that's, like, that's great.
Okay. So silent payments, imagine if It's for back. Yeah. Imagine if we had a decentralized directory for silent payments. Right. Well, we have that with, you know, l n u r l. Yeah. It's Noster. Right. Noster is your directory. Yep. So, I'm not I'm not, like, I hope nobody does that before me because I won't be the first one to do that. But I did put it up on GitHub, of course, what you're gonna do. What we're gonna do is sign in payment directory on Master. Right. Right. Master enabled open contact book. What I wanna do is I wanna have the sexy fucking Cash App UX with Cypher for blank. And part of the sexy fucking Cash App UX is that I send money to at Odell. Right. Right? I'm not sending money to, like, SP 1212 or whatever. And I think specifically it's probably a combo of silent payments for on chain Yeah. And then bolt 12 for lightning. Yeah. So, and you can even put, like, a native arc You can put a native arc address in there. You can put, The the the the one thing that I don't like about Master is that, it's it's too lightning focused where people still use on chain. I wanna do basically, I wanna do on chain zaps. Right? So Alex Gleeson,
[00:35:34] ODELL:
the guy who booked it social for chain, and now he's working on, like, AI and Master stuff, he released a spec for on chain zaps. Well, did I But it's a reused address.
[00:35:45] Francis Pouliot:
Oh, well It's not a silent payments. It's a reused address. That's the thing. Like, don't don't we're we're past that, you know. We're we're past the thing with silent payments, is that it's actually hard to execute.
[00:35:56] ODELL:
It's really difficult to to implement. Right? That's why nobody has done it. Well, that's why I kinda like that's that's why I kinda like this reuse status because it's very simple. And also, like, for public zaps, there are there's no privacy anyway. So it's, like, not that worst privacy to go. You you you can have you can have that in my post, it, like, says France has zapped, you know, 2,000 zaps or something. Sure. But we can we can have zaps that don't reveal the TXID.
[00:36:20] Francis Pouliot:
Of course. Yeah. Right. That's strictly better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's strictly better. So that's what I wanna I I don't wanna I I don't wanna go back, you know. So I I want I wanna try to push it forward, but, it's hard. And that that's why, for example, I gotta I gotta give a shout out to Cake. You know, Cake,
[00:36:36] ODELL:
Shitcoin wallet, it has it has Litecoin, it has Monero, it has all sorts of crap in it, but they have shipped. They ship, and they have shipped silent payments and Yeah. I have Seth on the show all the time, and I get so much shit for it. He's great. I love these guys. But I've I've historically given them a ton of shit for Bitcoin stuff. I think it's a distraction. They are kind of stuck in the tech tech tech tech tech debt world where it's like Yeah. They already have Nano users in shit, so it's hard to get them off the platform. But on the Bitcoin side, they ship like crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so silent payments. The other thing that I've,
[00:37:07] Francis Pouliot:
I don't wanna get too deep in that because that that's gonna be a hard pill for swallow for a lot of people. We did actually do a very, advanced Bitcoin wallet backup protocol, which is loosely based on the Photon SDK concept, which came out about five years ago. Hey. Let's talk about it real quick. Okay. Because I think cloud backups are actually
[00:37:27] ODELL:
once again, you're pushing the UX sovereignty trade off bounce. Did you try the encrypted backup in bulk? Have you had It doesn't work on iOS.
[00:37:34] Francis Pouliot:
Oh, it doesn't? Alright. Okay. You didn't hear that freaks. We're gonna fix that. Okay. So I've been I've been meaning to give you that feedback. Alright. Okay. So here's the here's here's the TLDR. We wanna make something that's easy to use, that's secure and that's very difficult. If you if you encrypt a Bitcoin wallet backup with a user generated password, you will get backed. Right? So you think you have a good password, you think your passphrase, you think your big 30 nine passphrase is good because it's fucking 12 characters? It's not. It's brute forcible. It it it really is. So some kind of like an Apple user, anyone who has access to iCloud Yes. Just
[00:38:10] ODELL:
try a budget and passwords to OneWorks, has a computer do it. Yeah. That's what it brute force. Because if I if I take
[00:38:16] Francis Pouliot:
the physical possession of your encrypted backup file, there's no rate limiting Yeah. On the encryption. Like, it's not like the pin on your phone, like, where there's rate limiting. There's a secure element stopping. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. If I have the physical backup, I can brute force the shit out of it and I will. And there has been a research of of people brute forcing bit 39 and you think the the the amount of generating compute enough to to brute force a password is a trivial thing now. Yeah. Right? It's like And users it's known that users don't make secure passwords. They they they they most certainly absolutely do not. Yeah.
[00:38:50] ODELL:
So what we did is basically And then you also have the opposite side where then they make it too secure and then they forget it. Good. You have to lose access to it. Right? Because you have to remember that most people I mean, I'm not reminding you. I'm reminding you freaks. Most people lose bitcoin. They don't get it stolen. So you're always trying to find this balance. And, you know,
[00:39:07] Francis Pouliot:
okay. So all of this is on recoverable.com. Okay. I literally have a video explaining all of these. I spent a lot of time and, you know, that's the background that I came from is from the big one embassy where I dealt with both the really high IQ and the low IQ users. So I think I know the big corner and I know, like, the big one person really well. And, of course, that's the big problem is if your passphrase is secure enough, you're gonna lose it and if it's insecure you're gonna get a brute force. So how do you fix that? Well, what we did is and I didn't invent that but I think we did it way better is basically we derive a very large encryption key from the bitcoin wallet private key itself using bip 85 right so you start with the mnemonic and we derive the child key essentially another mnemonic from your mnemonic right it's you know, it's just red random entropy, and we encrypt the mnemonic with the key that we derived from the mnemonic. Right. Okay?
So you can upload your encrypted mnemonic to the cloud because that to to to brute force that encrypted file is the same energy required to guess your private key. So but, of course, the problem is, alright. So now your encryption key is another mnemonic. What do you do with that? Hey. So I lost my phone. Right. How am I responding? Okay. So that encryption key that allows you well, the fir first of all, it to restore your your your backup file, you just go in your drive, in your Google Drive, and, like, you download it. It's fine. Right? But how do you, decrypt it? Well, we created something. It's called a key server. It's it's it's called a recoverable server, and think of that as being like a password like a password manager. It's fully anonymous. There's no accounts. There's no email. There's no phone number. It it works only on Tor.
And when you are doing a backup, you give the encryption key to the key server and you authenticate yourself with, like, a very easy password. Right? And So the user is still picking a password, but it's the easier password because it's it's not The the password can be a six digit PIN. Okay. Right? Because, the recoverable server enforces So it's backwards the user basically is just pressing cloud backups Yes. And then just remembering a six digit PIN. Yes. They lose their phone, they reload the app on the new phone, they put in their six digit PIN Yeah. And the wallet's there. It's it's minimum six digit PIN, and we we prevent the most retarded six like, you can't One one one one. You can't do that. Like, we we we, actually, we have the thousand most common PINs Okay. And you can't use the thousand most common pins. Wow. Anything other than one two three four five six, 111111, 888888, like, you can do that. So, the key server and, like, the way we've we've I'm not gonna go too deep into the details, but the way that we've implemented it is really good. It's fully anonymous. There's no way that the key server knows who you are. There's no option to connect to it other other than Tor. If there doesn't work, then you can't use the recoverable server. The key here is the key here is
[00:41:54] ODELL:
if we're gonna actually talk about trade off model, you could technically, you can technically, work with Apple and and steal the backup. Right? So so so so we're talking about that that that recoverable
[00:42:11] Francis Pouliot:
and Apple recoverable and Google aren't working together, which is a strictly better than just trusting Apple or just just Google. Right? If if I was somehow able to convince Larry Page to give me access to the other Google Drive Or vice versa. Or or vice versa. The the thing is Google doesn't know,
[00:42:27] ODELL:
which recoverable server is being used or if a recoverable server is being used because you can use you don't have to use the recoverable server. You can export that private key and just do a regular backup without using the server. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, I think this is a great trade off. Yeah. It's not cold storage, but it's not supposed to solve cold storage. It's it's it's the first thing on the website is, like, this is not cold storage. Let me right. Yeah. Yeah. You do the framing really well. And I think I mean, look at the opposite not the opposite, but another trade off balance here is what Phoenix does. Where on Phoenix, they have, like, a quick and easy upload to iCloud button. Yeah. And what they say is, like, they make you check a box that's, like, the NSA and Apple can steal your money. Are you cool with it? Yeah. And, also, that threat model is probably good for the majority of people. Like, I think most people don't have Apple
[00:43:10] Francis Pouliot:
and and the NSA in their threat model, and this is significantly better than that. And and, you know, I I wanted to do something that's also a little bit better than Envoy's, like, magic backup, but they they had the right idea. They had, like, the right UX. I just think ours is, like, a little bit more, like, consider I think it's considerably more, more secure. And the thing is, like, what people act and you have to think about, like, okay, what do people actually do? Right? And the same thing with Liquid. It's like, what do people actually use? Well, they use one of Satoshi. Yeah. And what do they do with the backup? They fucking put the entire mnemonic. Dude, people put their mnemonic in LastPass. Or like Apple Notes is even worse than that. They put it in Apple Notes. They put it in Google Drive.
What they do is they put the mnemonic on on a piece of paper and they leave it in their office. What they do is they scribble it on a fucking post it and they lose the post it. Like, that's what they actually do. Right? People don't get hacked. Take a screenshot, keep it in their photos or whatever. And, like, what they do is they they leave it on Coinbase. That's what they do. Right? With a password.
[00:44:05] ODELL:
Alright. So let's talk about art. Alright. So why am I fucking sold? Real quick. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. And last but not least, if none of that suits you, you can just write down a classic seed phrase Yeah. Of course. Stored securely and do that as your full Bitcoin backup. You lose if you lose your phone, you just put in your mnemonic. Boom. Done. You got it. And that's why thanks for the issue actually. Like, that's I I wanted
[00:44:26] Francis Pouliot:
the, turn off the exchange. Right? So so if you don't wanna use exchange, actually someone actually did a PR. I saw that. Yeah. It was in hot Really quick. It was like one day or something. It was a random person from the Internet that did the PR. I've zapped him for it. Yeah. Sweet. So I want, you know, I actually do use recoverable for my hot wallets because I don't know. I got like $800 on it, and it's still convenient. And I uninstall wallets all the time, so it's, like, super convenient. I like cloud backups. But but but, you know, the thing is I I'm obviously not gonna fucking put my stash on cloud backup because because my stash is, you know, I don't know where it is. I don't have a stash. Just just so it worked out. I lost all my Bitcoins, except the ones in my recoverable backup, just $600. That's all all the Bitcoins I have. But, yeah, of course. So so you can see the general theme here. The general theme is, like, I wanna make I wanna make sure that's easy, for my mom. My mom's a Bitcoiner, actually. She's fucking awesome. I wanna make, something that's easy for my mom, but also that I can use. And I know it sounds cliche, but, man, you would be shocked at the amount of people that told me, like, you cannot do that. Even I remember, like like like, I got feedback from, like, the Bitcoin design guy, the people in design club, and they're like, you know, you're you're trying too hard to, like, you're trying too hard to cater to both the cyclocon server and normies. Like, you you have to pick one. You know, like, you have to just either you have to be Sparrow or you have to be Aqua. Yeah. I'm like, no. I don't wanna be either Sparrow or Aqua. I want I want to be both. There's a happy middle. Right. There there is a happy middle and it's called advanced options. You know? And it's like you had you pick a default path. If you don't know what you're doing, you click the buttons. Next. Next. Next. And if you know what you're doing, then you click the advanced option and then you go into the advanced, the advanced settings, you know? And, right. So At the realtor, let's talk about our Okay. So, so ARC, is a completely different set of trade offs than liquid or any kind of custodial or semi custodial or trust minimized model, because ARC has this very specific feature where you have unilateral exits from arc. So arc is a concept where you will, the arc server virtualizes UTXOs into virtual UTXOs. So it's like converting your Bitcoin into virtual Bitcoin, which only exists into the in in an arc ecosystem. So not unlike, you know, Cashew or Liquid or that kind of stuff. It's a you have a token of a virtual UTXO which is worth one to one is worth a Bitcoin UTXO.
But what ARC does is that, there is a pre signed transaction which allows you to claim the Bitcoins on chain non cooperatively with the the server in case the server goes down. You can exit whenever you want with that one. Yes. You can exit whenever you want. And, like, the server can't rub you if you exit and if they get, you know, arrested or seized. And what's the trade off is that it costs a lot of non chain fees? Yeah. So so so the the trade off is that you that, like, let's say that you have $5 on Arc and you do a new viral exit, like, you're gonna get robbed. And there there's another kind of, like, weird trade off in ARC where ARC has a pre confirmed transaction model, which is, like, you can have a in order to get the on chain guarantee on ARC, you need to include your virtual UTXO in an actual music Taproot output on chain. Yeah. And that's not free. Right? The ARC ASP needs to publish a Bitcoin transaction in order to update, I guess, the state's
[00:47:51] ODELL:
So how often are they doing this?
[00:47:53] Francis Pouliot:
Man, if I dude, Alex is gonna kill me if I explain ARC wrong, but, they they will do that, whenever they want.
[00:48:01] ODELL:
Well, then I'll have Alex on at some point. You know, I'm I'm I'm assuming
[00:48:05] Francis Pouliot:
something like, like my assumption Like, once a day or something? Like, a couple times a day or something like that. Right? And you don't end but you don't have to have on chain guarantee because if you you you can choose to not have the on chain guarantee. And in that case, the ARC server, if it colludes with the sender, can double spend you. Right? So so if you have the on chain guarantee, you can't you can't be rugged. If you don't have the unchain guarantee, you trust that the ARC server is not colluding It's not malicious. It has to be actively malicious. It's it's like a zero con transaction. Yeah. But, the thing with the zero con, but the ASP needs to, like, actively collude against you. Right? So for anything that's like alright. So let's say I'm a merchant and I'm getting paid, like, I don't know, a $150 for for for a dinner. Mhmm.
Is the ARC organization
[00:48:59] ODELL:
going to double spend me? Are they colluding with the person buying dinner? Right? Yes. I mean,
[00:49:05] Francis Pouliot:
again, like, no. You know, there's like there's like The probability of that happening is very low. It's it's very low. So so do do I really need that $150 to be on chain claimable in a Taproot music output? Like, no. But, you know, if I'm a large organization or if I'm a or a large merchant, that's fine. Like and, you know, I'm getting to the point when where,
[00:49:27] ODELL:
I might also be afraid that the art server goes down, you know. Like So but that's right. Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong. So that's why, like, there's a balancing act there where you do it once a day or something. Yeah. Right? So it's like, okay. There's a settlement. Right? Like, once a day is it kinda settles and then it can happen. Look, as the as the end user, I'm I'm I'm gonna pay for the settlement. Right? So so the ARC,
[00:49:45] Francis Pouliot:
I mean, I don't know what the pricing model, but you you can imagine that if ARC is paying the on chain fees, they're eventually gonna pass that on to the end user. They're not gonna it's it's it's expensive, especially if fees go up. If we're actually bullish on Bitcoin, fees should probably go up. I don't know about that. But And the there's another problem with ARC, which is that, the ARC server needs to lock up liquidity to kinda, like, front the, the Arc network. So, the your virtual UTXO will expire. It actually expires. And, like, right now, I think it's, like, fifty days or something or, like, sixty days or something. So you need to refresh your UTXO, and there is a liveness requirement to that. And that's why people say that you need confidence to make Arc better. Right. Because, It makes it cheaper.
Well, okay. And I I I I'm going above my pay rate here, because, you know, I'm I'm not I'm not a Bitcoin script guy, but my understanding is that Convenance would allow people to, refresh their v t x o's, without a liveness requirement, like, without your wallet being online. But the thing is that we can solve these problems with software that's not protocol changes. Right? So for example is, like, getting CTV as a software, while it might be ideal for ARC, it seems very unlikely that we're We have to assume we have to assume that it's not gonna happen. The the same way to be a Bitcoin is to assume no soft forks will happen. Yes. Exactly. If you base your business model on a soft fork, you're gonna get wrecked. You're gonna get wrecked. So the same thing happened with, Lightning. Right? So what happens if your node is offline where when there is a But Lightning, we got the software. Yeah. But but but it we did get the software for Lightning, but, we still have to have a watch tower. Right? So so if your lightning node goes offline and there is, what's it called? Anyway, there's, an exit transaction Yeah. Like, your your no Penalty transaction. Yeah. Punct like, your no needs to wake up. Right? And that's why Otherwise, your counterpart against take all your money. Yes. So that's why we have the concept of watchtower. So, like, one of the reasons why I am here specifically right now And also, like, you have to be offline for, like, two weeks or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean In practice, most people aren't using watchtowers, and we rarely ever see that attack app. That that's that's that's right. It's it's the same thing for ARC. Like, if you are if you're online, then you can refresh. But if you're not if you're not online when your v you say so expires, like, there is a likeness requirement. So, you know, stuff that that that we are going to work on is a a kind of like a watchtower model, but a a delegate refresh model. Right? Where maybe the wallet operator like bull, we can run a delegate server so that the user tell it's like conceptually, the user is telling us, like, hey. Like, these are my VUTXOs.
This is when they expire. Like, refresh them for me when it's time to refresh for me. Well, they are taking custody or anything. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So it's just like a service to help. So that's there's, like, some of these trade offs that are somewhat fixed or mitigated by a soft fork. We're gonna try our very best to fix them with with light. It sounds like they're workable without. It's it's it's it's it's workable without and, like, the the so so liquid is kinda like in liquid, you can't really be double spent. It's like there's, like, more finality, but there's no exit transaction. Right? Which is really bad that there's no exit transaction. Of course, it's bad. And that's the that's the That's the beauty of lightning. Like, lightning has a bunch of trade offs
[00:53:08] ODELL:
that make it kinda shitty UX wise, self custody wise. But at the end of the day, I can always escape off chain on chain myself without any permission or Well, look, like, lightning is
[00:53:19] Francis Pouliot:
a miracle. It's it's it's amazing. Right? It it it's amazing. And then, so there is another one called Spark. I and I'm gonna be honest. I didn't I didn't look into Spark because of the vibes. Yeah. It's purely vibes. It's purely aesthetics. Clients grow vibes. Yeah. It's purely aesthetics and also, like, Spark and Arcade. So Arc is the name of the protocol. Arcade is the one implementation that, you know, people who are familiar with Alex b and, Tierro and Cooks, you know, these are Legends in their own right. Fucking my my favorites.
One one of the reasons why I'm so into ARK is because there's people I respect in this space. There's, Roy from Breeze. Yeah. There's, Tierro, which I knew from the liquid days. Yeah. And there's Cooks.
[00:54:07] ODELL:
Right? And, and there's both. Yeah. And And Frizz. Just Cooks, like, has a very low profile, but he's most well known for BTC pay server. He was heavily involved in BTC pay server, and he's actually one of the co creators of Nostr,
[00:54:21] Francis Pouliot:
alongside Fiat Jeff. And what these guys have in common is they ship. Yeah. They fucking deliver. Like, Thiero delivers. Cooks delivers. Roy delivers. Bolts delivers. And coincidentally, we were all at Arcade Day. We're very excited about Arc. Right? So so so the the the the there is there is a let's fucking ship mentality with with Arc. To be fair, Spark also did ship. They Smart Smart They've been a a lot of people have underestimated. They've shipped like crazy. Yeah. And and and Spark is shipping in a kind of a corporate way where they are, like, going after exchanges and, like, they're It's more it's more polished. It's easier to build on right now. Spark bought a payment processor in order to get inside, like, the the kind of, like, fintech payment space. Oh, it helps when you get a $165,000,000 with a 16 seed investment. That, yeah, that that doesn't hurt, to to to be perfectly honest.
However, I and I don't wanna say anything negative about Spark. It's just,
[00:55:21] ODELL:
you know Well, I'll go out there. Like, the biggest negative right now is on the privacy side. They basically modeled Spark off of, Mercury layer, which is a state chain implementation, and then they stripped the privacy stuff out, and then they made it even less private. So, like, right now as it currently stands, you can kind of think it like of it like the Tron trust model, which ironically, a lot of people use Tron. More people Mhmm. Use Tron, quote, self custody than Bitcoin. But it's just with a single reusable address. So if you have someone's Spark address, if you pay them once on Lightning and you have their Spark address, you can see every transaction they've ever made Yeah. Including their current balance. Yeah. But on the alternate side, it's really easy to build. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And,
[00:56:04] Francis Pouliot:
one of the things that, ARC, I think, we will have to work on is, the privacy as well because, of course, the ASP, you can you can think of you can think think of ARC as, like, a private mental, which is the ASP's, private mental. So obviously the ASP, can see all of the VITXOs. You as a user, you can't see, like, the mental as ARC's private mental. Presumably, they couldn't make it public. So it's not, I don't think it's an improvement necessarily of privacy over Bitcoin in the same way that, like, liquid, it has a privacy improvement over Bitcoin even though Liquid also has a utility It's not a perfect analogy, but I call it like a custodial privacy model. You're trusting you're trusting a third party with your privacy. Yeah. I mean, people already trust electric surfers, like, random electric surfers and Internet. So but, you know, the the thing about ARC transaction is that they're essentially free inside the ARC network. Yeah. And, if they're free, I don't know. Maybe we can do CoinJones and ARC. I don't know. Like, it's it's still early. I'm I'm I'm confident that the guys involved in ARC and Arcade specifically are, are people that have worked on privacy technologies, I think I think we're gonna be able to solve that. So, like, the thing about the thing about ARC is that it has different trade offs, but it has some really, really neat features.
So is it going to replace liquid? Yeah. That's my next question. Is there a future where liquid gets removed from the bull wallet and arc gets replaced with it? There there payments? There's a 100% of future. There's a 100% of future where, the instant payments wallet, which is, like, the default one that the the user that that doesn't know what he's doing is the one that he's receiving funds into. Yeah. There is a future where that's in our wallet. Okay. And that and that future,
[00:57:47] ODELL:
might be close, might be far. Do you think the middle future is, like, you have both in there or is is there gonna be a world because that gets confusing too. I mean so there's, like Did I see a screenshot that you posted online that was, like, bull using ARC? Yeah. So What's going on there? Is that just testing? Or
[00:58:02] Francis Pouliot:
I mean, it's testing on on mainnet with real money. So it it it is I I I have ARC on the mainnet right now. So, of course, there are things that when you say, like, sleep at night, like, what makes me sleep at night. Right? There are I'm not comfortable, with with, like, onboarding you to ARC right now. I I I would feel bad because, the the UTXO expiry stuff is not is not really solved. There's no UX around the, unilateral exit. There's no UX around, the the delegation, delegated the refresh of the UTXO. So there's, like, stuff that's missing. Whereas on liquid, I mean, it's it's pretty Paul. I mean, liquid is this for for, like, ten years, so it's like, you know, give it some time. But I I think that future is, like, a lot closer than than than we think. And, like, okay, so there's, like, a wallet. It's called layers. Right? And layers is kind of like, we have all the layer twos and, like, you can choose your layer two, like but that's that's it's like, man, there's, like, this this, like, info thing in the wallet where I, like, explain the art, the liquid security. Imagine me explain, like Yeah. Choose your network. Like, here's the trade off. Lost the user when you're doing that. I I have to make that choice for them. And I have to make that choice for them. And I have to make that choice for them. And I have to make that choice for them. And I do see the default. Like, I love them, but, like, if if a user needs to watch it to our BTC sessions video, like, we've already lost the plot. Yeah. Of course. They should never have to do that. It's just very simple. So Volvik one is gonna have to decide whether the default is arc or liquid or spark or state chain or mercury or whatever it is. And I'm gonna make that decision based on what I think is right.
And I think right now, of course, liquid is the obvious choice. It's it's liquid is the now. Arc is the future. Yeah. And Arc also has other kind of, like, defy, implications to it, which get people really excited. Not me, really. Like, I'm more of a I'm more of a dumb dumb. Like, I like I just wanna pay for pay for my fruits with Bitcoin. I don't I don't need, fucking,
[01:00:00] ODELL:
sushi swap exchange. Right. Coins. So yeah. I'm, I want people to pay with Bitcoin and earn Bitcoin. That's that's what I want. And then I guess, like, the one thing that might be valuable, quote unquote, in the defies place is, like, lending stuff. Exactly. But then the question to me is always, like, at the end of the day, like, if I take a loan out of my Bitcoin, first of all, you should be very careful with it because that's how people get wrecked. But then second of all, like, I need dollars in my bank account. So there's gonna be centralized elements regardless. Well, there's so why are we pretending why are we doing this huge Rube Goldberg machine when you have tether in there, so you're trusting tether, and then you have your bank account in there somewhere, so you're trusting your bank account. I'm not gonna go too much into the questionable. I'm I'm not gonna go too much in details,
[01:00:41] Francis Pouliot:
but you can have very trustless, almost trustless stable coins on mark.
[01:00:49] ODELL:
You you can have that. You you you we we can we can make But is it what is that, like, is it, like, die or something? Like, it's, like, Bitcoin collateralized algorithmic stable coin? Kind of. It's like have a tendency to blow up too. Right?
[01:01:02] Francis Pouliot:
So think of the the fact that on ARC you have the unilateral exit from the ARC v UTXO. You can have a unilateral exit on Bitcoin from a stable coin. Right? That's that that that's something that ARC makes possible. That's cool. It is it is cool, and it's it's probably the only thing about ARC that's not Bitcoin that interests me. The other thing that that we can do on on ARC is, like, these kind of, like, trustless swaps between, like, you know, if you're if you're if you're trading Bitcoin for stablecoins right now Right. There's a centralized counterparty, but kind of like the bolts model where you can have a ton atomic swap. You can have an atomic swap between, a Bitcoin and a stable coin. Okay. That's not a.
But really, this is like it's like it's like icing on the cake. It's DeFi stuff. I'm not interested in it personally. You like the payments use case. I like I like the payments use case, and, I I I think ARC is the only thing that has come up other than Spark, which is, like, a fully new model. Right? Like, because cashew, fetti, liquid, it's the same kind of thing. Right? It's like you have a custodian or you have an entity which is guaranteeing a peg, whatever. It's like cash, liquidity, and liquid are like different shades of the same thing, whereas ARK is a completely new thing. I think a good comparison is like lightning. It's like fundamentally
[01:02:23] ODELL:
Yeah. A fundamentally innovative Yeah. New way for Bitcoin payments.
[01:02:29] Francis Pouliot:
Absolutely. And, like, as a as a fanboy of, you know, like, we Bolt Bolt was we integrated lightning in 2019 Right. But we launched it on May 2022. It took us three years to do that just because it wasn't ready. But, like, I I was, like, first to jump on lightning, first to jump on liquid, and, like, just out of, I guess, just out of ego, I wanna be the first one to to run on Arc. So so Arc actually does work in the bull wallet. Like, you can send from, like, the Bull Wallet, if you have access to the super user mode. And I I don't think I'm gonna give it to the I'm a little scared. There is a super user mode. If if you don't ask me nicely, I'll I'll give you the the codes. You have to tap certain things in the wallet and then access the Arc ARC wallet, but it it is reckless. ARC, it's it's reckless right now.
So so do it really is. So, like, do that with, like, pocket money. But, but yeah. So so it it does work, and, like, we have the best best engineers ever and, like, really excited to and, of course, like, not only do I want, Arc in the wallet, I want Arc in the exchange. Same thing with PageJoin. PageJoin is in the wallet right now. It's not in the exchange, and it's not for legal reasons at all. It's literally just because what we're talking about earlier, like, PageJoin v two is, like, reckless, and it just Yeah. It just kinda breaks. So it's it's it's fine if it's, you know, you and me testing a page line at a conference. But, like, if someone's buying, like, a $100 worth of Bitcoin, I don't want the page to fail. Yeah. Of course. But still, I don't think money would be a lot there's no risk of money. No. Money money wouldn't be lost. It was just kinda like No transaction.
Yeah. The the page one would like to get stuck and then there would be a fallback transaction. It was just, you know, kind of like piss people off, really. But, yeah, I I do wanna have, arc arc I wanna play with arc and and the bullet exchange and, like, make make that like, I want bullet point to be always, like, the the most technologically advanced exchange at the at the at the forefront. And, like, our goal really has always been, like, just just looking like the the be the model. Like, I wanna be the I wanna be I wanna be the model that, like, people emulate.
[01:04:36] ODELL:
Okay. I got a couple more topics real quick. Just real quick back to Liquid. It feels like Liquid could do a little bit more on the privacy side. You've been very, involved, like, in liquid network management and whatnot. Do you is there any interesting updates happening there on that side, or is it kinda stagnant and it is what it is? And we have confidential transactions and we should just be
[01:05:05] Francis Pouliot:
I mean, at with what we have. At the protocol level, I don't think there's much more that can be done, but there's Or not even the protocol of a I mean, there's there's nothing stopping a visabi Of course. There there's nothing stopping anyone right now from from doing coin zones and liquid. Like, they Well, there's no app. No one wants to do it. Right? I mean, I think no one wants to because liquid has a really funny thing, which is that, chain analysis doesn't work on liquid because chain analysis uses I mean, it could, but one of the main heuristics of chain analysis is,
[01:05:40] ODELL:
change detection. Yeah. And Specifically, like, around the mouse. Yeah. And if you don't see it because and the freaks know this, but but the way chain analysis works and chain surveillance works is all probability analysis, and they're trying to figure out when ownership changes. Yes.
[01:05:53] Francis Pouliot:
So when you don't have the amounts, it makes it much more difficult. It it makes us really, really, really hard. But if you're, like, sending max amounts, then you can still there's no change. It gets becomes a little bit obvious stuff like that. There's there's no there's no no. You're right. Yeah. So if you're doing max amounts and and also there's a new thing. It's like there are a lot of page ones on liquid. Yeah. There's a tons of page ones. Yes. So page join does do. It even better improvement on liquid than it does on chain because the amounts are blind. And the reason why there's so many page ones on liquid is that all the USDT to Bitcoin swaps happening on liquids are used, using a, like, somewhat non disclosure model called site swap, and every swap is a page on a liquid. Right? So a lot of transactions are liquid or actually page on. So the common input ownership heuristic, which is the core of gen analysis Do you think Boltz will do that as well? Do page joins by default? Because maybe that's all we need. Maybe that makes a huge upgrade. It's up to both. Okay. It's up to both. What I will say what I will say is that with the advent of page join one point zero point zero, many things become more more possible than than were before like page one was was definitely a little reckless and then there's also page one d three which is an exaggeration of page one which is multi party page one which is you know effectively a coin join in a way, and we could drop in that on to liquid too, Right? Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course. That's one of the cool parts about liquid is it's very similar to bitcoin. It's it's it's like it's like a it's like a fork of bitcoin where you can just play around with it, you know, and since it's centralized, we can update it without without too many worries.
But no. Like like, the thing about page one that really so I have a I have a specific, very, personal and very visceral hatred of chain analysis, of some chain analysis companies for it's a long story I'll I'll I'll share one day. I I really dislike chain analysis. And one of their motivations for me, to to to make Page one a reality is that I actually believe that the chain analysis companies are are bullshit. They're they're they're phonies, they're fake, they're voodoo. They're doing a lot of bad things, but that's the worst part. Right. They're they're astrologers. And what they end what they end up doing is they do a lot of false positive where where Bitcoiners who are innocent are, have evidence against them on shame that they did something wrong where they they did it. They they didn't do anything wrong. And the change It's probability analysis. And, like, when it's 60% probability,
[01:08:18] ODELL:
the chain of the analyst firms, they, like, pretend it's a 100.
[01:08:21] Francis Pouliot:
They pretend it's definitive. They say it's 60% probable. Right? But that number is fucking pulled out of their buttholes completely. Right. They're, like, 10%. Right. And I you know, it's like you either you either did it or didn't do it. Right? It's like crime is bling. You know what I mean? You're not 60% guilty, but the problem is the justice system is taking Cheninossa's word for it because it has partly because based on the common ownership, common input ownership heuristic. So if we destroy that heuristic, then is any chain analysis evidence ever admissible in court after that? Because if the if chain analysis is there's an argument it shouldn't be admissible already. Right. But but even more so. Right. Because, you know, chances can say, like, we have we have some solid reasoning behind our report, and I can be like, well, your solid reasoning is based on this realistic, which is no longer correct. So all of your fucking analysis falls apart. So page one is really cool really cool in that in that regards. Also, a really neat thing about page one is that it allows for anyway, I'm such a fan of page one. It's so great. It allows for passive consolidation of Bitcoin. So when you consolidate when you have a lot of small UTXOs in your wallet, that's not a good thing because in the future, if the the fees go up, you will be paying transaction fees for every little UTXO you have in your wallet. So you wanna consolidate. Right? But people don't know that they should consolidate, and they don't know how to consolidate. Less UTXOs are better fee wise, but worse privacy wise. Exactly.
Exactly. So that's why, by the way, with the auto swap, like, the I think that a million sat UTXO is, like, the right trade off between privacy and and I I think the million SAT UTXO is, like, it's it's, like, should be the default right now. But if you are You're saying push it, but I like it. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's it's sounds nice. A 100 a 100,000 will probably always be economically spendable. Yeah. Like, at least the next next ten years or so. Yeah. That's true. But, like, a a a million UTXOs is a is a thousand bucks. Like, if the coffee shop owner knows that you had a thousand bucks, like, everybody has a thousand bucks. You know what I mean? I agree. It's a good check. So if you have UTXOs in your wallet, the way that you would consolidate is by sending those UTXOs to yourself. Yeah.
Send all to myself. Yes. But if you have Pejoint in your wallet and I am sending you Bitcoins, you are consolidating passively without realizing it as a receiver. Yeah. Which is fucking awesome. Because as a receiver, I'm contributing an input Yeah. And then you're contributing an input Yeah. And then I get one bigger input of it. Yes. Yes. So that's that's the love page on. But I guess you contribute two inputs. I contribute two inputs. I contribute one input. Right? And then we do We we we we can program page on to do whatever we want. Like, the bull Bitcoin wallets could have consolidation mode. Right? Where you you know what I mean? Like like, okay, let's say you have 10 inputs. You have 10 UTXOs, but you only need to contribute two.
You can choose to contribute all of them in that page on it. Right? And we can have the consolidation mode as a social based on the network fees at the time. You can say, hey. If the fees are less than this amount Well, that's why I think it may be particularly helpful on the liquid side because fees are so fucking cheap. It's like 33¢
[01:11:30] ODELL:
or something. Yeah.
[01:11:31] Francis Pouliot:
And if you're consolidating Bitcoin, maybe, you know, you can consolidate it inside a swap. Right? So you have tons of small UTXOs you wanna consolidate. You're not gonna gain backwards privacy because those once the coins are consolidated on chain, like, we can all see that they're linked to the same person. Yeah. Unless it's a big one. Unless it's a big one. But, if you consolidate into a swap, you know, you you consolidate into liquid and then you swap it back to Bitcoin, like, that new Bitcoin that you got is completely unlinked. Very unlinked, let's say, to to the original to the original Bitcoin that you got. So, like, so, you know, like like,
[01:12:09] ODELL:
coin drawing is not coin drawing is not the only game in town. Yeah. Right. No. I agree. As and especially with confidential transactions, I think it could be there's a lot of cool things you can do on the liquid side without protocol change. Yep. That my mind is really racing now that there's actually a very usable liquid wallet. Because that was the one of the main things Yeah. Stopping liquid usability was there was just no good user facing stuff and now we have It's a never effect, man. And the thing is, like, it's it's kind of exponential because what happened is
[01:12:36] Francis Pouliot:
Bolt's Breeze, Bull, and, to some degree also the Aqua team and some other teams kind of, like, all gravitated towards the same conclusion at the same time, which was around the time, by the way, of the Bitcoin at Planis, the the conference in in Madera where we all kind of, like, got together and we were like a lot of the builders were like, this is this is what we're gonna do. This this is the model that so so there's, like, the network effect of of liquid is growing, but the network effect of arcades, is is also growing really quick, man. I Yeah. You'll have a look at that there's there's at least,
[01:13:12] ODELL:
at least six Bitcoin companies right now that are building an arc. And I think the fact that you're the a lot of a lot of wallets, including yourself, are using lightning as, like, kind of the interoperable layer. It is. You said that you didn't it doesn't you don't have to fight the network effect as much because you can drop an arc where liquid is, and at the end of the day, they're still paying and receiving from lightning. So that I have I have a question for you. The so the biggest trade off with using a liquid enabled lightning wallet is is small we haven't really talked about it. It's small transactions because you do have to make that on you have to make the liquid the liquid transaction. So, like, sending, like, I think a lot of bots, maybe yours even included, like, you you can receive a payment under a thousand sats, which, you know, people for whatever reason love sending, like, 3 sats payments, so you have that, but the second piece is you don't have lightning address support, how do you think about that, like, I will email support? We will. I'm gonna I'm gonna make it happen. I'm just gonna ship it. I'm gonna fucking ship it. I'm gonna Is there is there a concern that, like, how does that work? Are you gonna be running basically a server that is, like, holding liquid addresses or something? Like, how does that work? Yeah. It's gonna be directory server. Right? So so,
[01:14:21] Francis Pouliot:
and that is not as trustless, is there there there's there's more trust assumption involved there, but what we can do as, like, a company is we can run a lightning server and basically, you give us, like, a liquid, you know, I guess, an ad Either either an x club or one address. It's probably better if it's just one address. I think address reuse is probably better than x public to be perfectly honest. So Couldn't couldn't I was thinking, like,
[01:14:54] ODELL:
every time I open the wallet
[01:14:56] Francis Pouliot:
You can send it out. Or send you, like, a 100 addresses or something. Yeah. Yeah. We we can we can lock 100 addresses. Yeah. But basically, what would happen is, like, I would create a swap between the sender and your address Yeah. As the receiver, and we would be hosting, like You give it to Bolt's And yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And instead of creating a lightning network invoice with my node as the server operator, I get a a I create a swap with the bolt server. It's not it's not as fully trustless as a proper bolt swap. There's, like, a tiny amount of time in in between that swap where a rug can technically happen.
[01:15:30] ODELL:
Not fully You could probably man in the middle. You could give a liquid address that you control so that I control. Yeah. There there's, like, I need to Which I think is fine. I I need to get a little deeper into that. I just want people to be able to pay me at a [email protected],
[01:15:43] Francis Pouliot:
you know. Know? Like, it's just a convenience thing. And if I need if I need more security, then I'll give them an actual invoice. Well, the thing the thing on Liquid is, like, we actually dropped the fees on Liquid. Like, is Yeah. We can just do things on a centralized network, which is great. So the fees on on Liquid is $0.01.0.01 sat per v byte
[01:16:04] ODELL:
and a It's like 33 sat of transactions.
[01:16:09] Francis Pouliot:
For a confidential transaction, which is, like, 20 times bigger than than a than a than a regular transaction, I think we're talking about 3,000 vBytes. Therefore, yes, 33 SaaS. For a regular transaction, it's zero. Right? So so a regular transaction on liquid that's not confidential, is basically free. And the reason why we don't do swaps, under a thousand sets is because a swap transaction involves two on chain transactions and two on chain confidential transactions. So, like, bold Bitcoin swaps using bolts, which we could, like, not use confidential transactions if you wanted to, but I think it's worth it. It's not using very, that will be 6,000 bytes. Therefore, 60 sets. Right? 66 Sats around that, which is, like, I don't know, man. Like, we could yeah. I mean, it's it's, like, 6% of a thousand Sats transactions. So it's, like, not great. But there's nothing stopping us from doing, for example, silent payments on Liquid. We could do that. Yeah. We could we could we could do a bunch of things. Right? We can just do that if we want to.
So, definitely, like, at least on chain, I wanna have the the on chain zaps with, because the the UIpes that we want is, like, yeah. I I pay at Badel and then at Badel is a Master handle. So my Bold Bitcoin wallet, which I very obviously, we're gonna have Monster in the Bold Bitcoin wallet Yeah. For for many reasons. I first of all, I wanna have, private group chats Yeah. In in both Bitcoin Yeah. Because when you are paying someone, you are also talking with that person. Right. Whether because let's say I wanna pay you, I mean, you're gonna be like I may be like sending address. Right? It's a human condition. It's like what? It's like 80% of p two p trays are happening on, like, WhatsApp or something. Yeah. Of course. People just want to chat. Yeah. Of course. So so you want that to be confidential. There's also cool things. Obviously, the next frontier is multisig. Right? So I've never been a individual multis multisig, fan, like like multisig yourself.
Never been a fan. But I think now with the technologies that that are arriving with mini scripts, now is the time to, like, have a refresh at the MultiSync experience. And what I really wanna do is something that I use personally. My my greatest shame is that I use the BitPay wallet. Copay. Right? It used to be called Copay, now it's just called BitPay Yeah. For multisig because The original multisig wallet. The original multisig wallet because both Bitcoin, we have some of our budget is in Bitcoin. Right? So, you know, like, when when made x does these crazy, like, stunts, you know, that that that for both Bitcoin, you know, we have a we have a a budget for we we call it that we can just do things budget, and it's it's a it's a multisig wallet. And and in order to make sure that nobody does anything too retarded with that budget, we have a multisig. And why don't you Sparrow for those? Because you want mobile? It's because we we spend a lot of we we do it all the time. Right? So you want the convenience of mobile? Yeah. Exactly. I get I get, like, a notification on BitPay app, which is, like, Natex wants to spend this amount of money to, I don't know, rent a tank. Oh, and it just gives you an it gives you an in app notification. Yeah. With a message. With, like, literally, like press, like, approve. Yeah. Exactly. Like, Francis, I want $5,000, I'm gonna rent a tank Right. For for a video shoot or something. And I'm, like, approve or deny. So I want that over white noise. Yeah. I want that over in Austria. 100%. Right? I wanna do other things in in in Austria. I want White noise will be perfect for that. I want it's still early, but it'll Like, I wanna be able to communicate with the the bull users. Yeah.
I can't right now. As as the bull bitcoin operator be because I've said this push notification, basically. Well, probably push notification. Well, basically, what I can do is I can create a nostril as a very small I don't I don't wanna compete with with social media stuff. I wanna use nostril as a back end. A contact foot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like as a back end communications network for contacts and for stuff like that. But there's nothing stopping you or us, which obviously we will do, to generate a master key pair and you're connected to, you're automatically following whole Bitcoin or you're automatically collected to to my relay or something like that. And I'm saying, like, guys, we have an update or something like that. And and you, I'm not pushing anything to you. You're following me, I'm not sure. Right. Automatically And you're opening the app and you don't even check your And and and in the app, we can just say, like, hey. Any message that's coming from this end pub Just say displayed on the displayed on the homepage. Right? Because we this end pub is the, like, emergency bulb equipment and, like, there's a bug. We need to update stuff transact whatever it is. Or, like, you know, Indians have arrived, whatever it is. It's important. It's important to be able to communicate with the users in a secure way. Yeah. So so not not not not not their art, silent payments, all that kind of shit. I love it. Like yeah.
[01:20:49] ODELL:
Yeah. Okay. I don't, like, kept you too long already, and you have some obligations, but, you're not allowed to leave without what's your opinion on, core thirties opera turn? Oh, well,
[01:21:04] Francis Pouliot:
it's such a I have the only correct opinion, by the way. So I have I have the I've noticed that about most of your opinions is how you feel about them. And and, it's it's it's it's it's so nuanced. In order to be correct, you need to have a lot of nuance. I, I don't wanna burst anybody's bubble, but running knots, will not it's it's it's there there's there's there's a certain fatality, fatalistic aspect to my opinion, which is there's nothing we can do really to prevent spam, and that was proven by, you know, the kind of like the joker of Bitcoin, like Peter Todd, you know, who, like, created Liber Relay and he was like, like We'll relay all the things. Oh, we'll relay all the things. And then before before that, there was a kind of gentleman's agreement in Bitcoin that, you know, we have two mechanisms.
We have the policy one and we have the consensus one. And the policy one, you can call it a gentleman's agreement, like, and if someone decides to not be a gentleman, you can't force the agreement on them. Whereas the consensus layer, of course, is the hard rules. That's the hard rules of government. It's the hard the hard rules, of course. And, you know, I, I have mixed feelings about Bitcoin Core, and I I kinda feel it's kinda weird because I've been in the early camp of, like, you know, there's some things about Bitcoin core, the the process, because bit like, there's something about the Bitcoin core process and, of the Bitcoin core inner circle that I don't like. Yeah.
There's definitely, like, a a click a little clicky 100%. Yeah. Aspect to it and, you know, not everybody's PRs get merged and it it helps the difference. Yeah. If you want to get sh things shipped in Bitcoin core and you're part of the inner circle, you kind of, like, get you know, you're not automatically white listed, but, you know, your your stuff is So there's a fast track. Yeah. You're fast track. There's, like, things that that I don't like. Specifically about Bitcoin core 30, by the way, which really sucks is they removed that was the thing that I that pissed me off the most. Really niche thing. They removed support for legacy wallets. They removed support for importing Bitcoin. Bitcoin addresses and private keys into a Bitcoin core wallet, which means that we will not be updating to Bitcoin core 30, because, part of Cipher Note, like our open source Bitcoin back end relies on that to work, relies on legacy wallets, so that kinda sucks.
[01:23:29] ODELL:
But Bitcoin's fine. Bitcoin's What was their argument for that?
[01:23:34] Francis Pouliot:
I I'm assuming it's because They built cleanup or something? Yeah. Something is that they don't they don't wanna work. They don't wanna maintain it. Yeah. And, it's fine. Like, I don't need them to make I can run, you know, 29.2, forever. Yeah. 29.2 introduces the 0.1 stats per, or the the lower side bite limit. You like that change. I fucking love it, man. I fucking love it. Like, if the miner is, there's you know, I don't wanna have an artificial price for for Yeah. That's that's communism. You know? That's what we have in Canada with the price of fucking maple syrup. You know what I mean? There's a an artificial price for on it or something like that. So I'm I'm happy that the fees are fees are getting low. But the thing is, like, if I had never heard of the Bitcoin core upturn, debate, it would still have not affected my life. Right?
So and, of course, like, I don't I don't like spam. Of course. I don't want it to be on Bitcoin. I don't like shit coins. I don't like I don't I don't want some people want the shit coins to be on Bitcoin. Like, they specifically want that. Like, I don't want that at all. Same. I'm a monetary Bitcoiner. You know, I think the Bitcoin, blockchain is not a general purpose database. It's it's a financial it's a monetary transaction database. It's like what I want it to be. It's money. It is money, but unfortunately, it's not up to me to decide what it is. It's up to the the the the consensus, to decide. And short of a soft fork or a hard fork even maybe, there's nothing we can do. And Is there even a really a fork that could stop it? I mean, you could obviously move off return, but you still have shit coins in Bitcoin. I mean, there would certainly be a whack a mole game where, you know,
[01:25:12] ODELL:
after we do let's say we do some You can't but you can't really do whack a mole soft forks. So the soft forks are super difficult to pull off. Correct. And and I think people have gotten a little bit spoiled. We haven't had that many soft works, but people have gotten spoiled with the soft works that we have. Yeah. They don't realize that, first of all, there's no really way to know if there's consensus ahead of time. Yeah. You're kinda winging it. You feel like there's consensus. Yeah. And if a significant portion if there isn't consensus, you could have an inverted chain split after the fact. Yeah. Of course. Of course. Which would just be chaotic. It'd be fine. Everyone would be, like, you could Yeah. Go to sleep and be fine if you have have your funds in self custody. But if you're running businesses and stuff, it'd be a fucking pain in the ass. Yeah. Yeah. So, like,
[01:25:50] Francis Pouliot:
aesthetically, I'm kind of like, I wish there was no spam. Yeah. I wish there was no nothing. And then, you know, I I also I also feel like there's something wrong with the Bitcoin core process. But at the same time, like, Bitcoin core does ship really nice things, and a lot of the technologies that, we're going to need I mean, I'm not I I I I'm I'm getting closer to the belief that that some form of confidence is is something that I would like to see on Bitcoin. And the thing is, like, I I've never been, like, fully closed minded against covenants. I just I was just, like, you know, like, kind of like with Taproot, it's, like, with Arc, now it's like, oh, you can actually use Taproot to be so so so Arc is a Taproot thing. Right? Yeah. Taproot is and I was like very skeptical of Taproot because like, no nobody is fucking using Taproot. Like, only the shareholders are using Taproot. It's fucking retired. Why did we even need Taproot? Yeah. The thing is Bolt actually uses Taproot for the the refund path, which is great. So Bolt, actually implemented Taproot in a really nice way. So I was, like, actually, Bull Bitcoin is now a Taproot user. Right. And with ARC, ARC is just full Taproot. Right? So I'm like, okay.
What the guys on ARC have done, it it's kinda like, okay. Right. So despite opening up some attack vector, we did gain arc with Taproot. Right? And then, with And with the attack vector, it's, like, cheaper spend. Right? Yeah. Yeah. There was the Inscriptions exploit, which was always possible, quote, quote, but obviously made Significantly cheaper. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It made made, the the barrier to spam, difficult or the barrier to spam was, like, reduced, let's call it, with with Taproot, somewhat, not not fully, but somewhat. They could they could have spanned anyway on just segway without that route. But, so I think, like, we core core can and this is the kind of thing that that core can ship that that very few other people can ship. Like, let's say, to ship Convenience onto Bitcoin is something that's very, very tricky, and even the core devs and and the Bitcoin devs in general, like, don't agree. And And when we implement it, it's it's hardcore shit, man. It's like it's and so having having, like, hardcore protocol crypto experts able to deliver that thing is is is nice.
So that could be upgrading to Bitcoin $4.30 until we've fixed.
[01:28:25] ODELL:
And what's funny you gotta do work on the cipher node side to remove the legacy wall. It depends on Yeah. And you know what's gonna do? Some time to do that. I mean, I was gonna do that anyway.
[01:28:33] Francis Pouliot:
Eventually, I was gonna we were gonna switch server stuff eventually, but, you know, yeah. That's that's the essence of my opinion is that, it's, it's over. The the the the the the gentleman's agreement was broken, and that's what it is. Yeah. We,
[01:28:50] ODELL:
I think I'm pretty much completely aligned on your opinion, and I've talked about this just at length, for almost over a year now. Just been a massive DDoS in my time, but, look, it's good that people care about Bitcoin so much. Yeah. I think we died based on apathy. Apathy is probably the single biggest risk to Bitcoin. Just real quick, so when we launched Open Sats, this was the main concern we had was the there was a very, I had maybe it's too strong of a word, but it felt kind of like incestuous funding path and core group. Mhmm.
And we thought Open SaaS could do something different and be more independent and be more transparent and be more open. Yeah. And and I think we've really accomplished that goal, we've provided over 300 grants, like really just try to broaden the pie. Yeah. And a lot of that the overall majority of that isn't for protocol. Yeah. It's for us, you know, we're the largest supporter of BTC pay server now. Mhmm. We've done a lot of cashier support, tons of different mobile wallets, pay join. Yeah. We help them start up their their in their non profit. They have their own non profit now, and that's one of the things we wanna see, like, a thousand flowers bloom. But for better or for worse, we found basically massive success, and now we're the heavyweight in the room. Yeah. And so I'm getting a lot of flack, which is fine, like I understand, you know, people and and to be clear, the way we designed OpenSats is that I'm just one vote of nine votes. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I can't unilaterally push things through. But do you have any there's a new narrative of just, like, funding any developers this way is bad. Do you have any, like, recommendations or opinions on how we proceed with OpenSats? Like, what's the best path for Bitcoin going forward on that front? I think OpenSats failed a very much needed
[01:30:42] Francis Pouliot:
narrative and an operational space, which is that the protocol devs were, like, they're to improve Bitcoin, you you you you can do other types of software which is not protocol development, like like the ones that you named. And before OpenSats, I think, like, the the the Bitcoin cord if you wanted to to fund the Bitcoin, you would just fund Bitcoin cord devs and what OpenSats is is fund the application layer, which is the one that is that I'm that that I'm most interested in. You know, I wish there was more private companies Same. Doing that. Right? And, like, I I will say that that's one of my biggest, my pride is that, like, all of the software that we do, is is funded by us. Right? So, like, the Bolt the Bolt Rust library, which is used by a bunch of, these, these these new wallets, that's us. Like, we maintain a bunch of open source software.
You know, PayJoin, I I paid my debts to work on PayJoin. I paid, I financed, you know, I I did, like, little private grants, so, like, joinster and, like, a bunch of shit like that. I wish a lot of more people would do it, but, apparently, they don't. I am actually, like, kinda, like, a little concerned that, that I'm competing with OpenSats for, like, employees. So so but, you know, it is what it is. Like pay them less than people realize, though. Yeah. Yeah. We we intentionally don't publicly say what our highest grant amount is because people would just apply for the highest, but it's not that high. Yeah. I mean, it's not it's not that high, but, you know, Bull Bitcoin is also not like a VC funded company. So we, like, you know Yeah. But that's a that's an ethical I like the choice. Yeah. I think a lot of the a lot of Bull Bitcoin devs,
[01:32:26] ODELL:
take a pick at working on Bold Bitcoin. They take a look. Also say, like, look. My dream is similar to your dream because I actually have to go out there as a volunteer and try and raise donations Yeah. Which is not sustainable. Yeah. And I think it's much more sustainable, and I'm a capitalist to have private companies doing this. And that's where the ten thirty one side comes in. Right? Because we're one of the few Yeah. VCs that actually fund full open source stack companies like StartNine Yeah. Yeah. Or mempool mempool that space Yeah. Primal. Mhmm. And the dream there is, like, actually sustainable, profitable businesses that contribute to open source. Yeah. And I would just say on that front too, while I really respect that you are completely bootstrapped operation, as a Bitcoin focus open source VC, there's also not that much money there. No. No. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. For sure for sure. It's not a light spark. It's a 165,000,000
[01:33:13] Francis Pouliot:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Scene around. And and to be very clear, like, I love what you guys are doing. And, you know, fuck the haters. Go they they could go fuck themselves. It's, you know, if you're not if you're not building anything, your opinion matters very little to me. Right? And, like, you know, you guys are not specifically building shit, but you're you're you're you're enabling builders. Yeah. And, like, you know, there's a really good example, for example, is page on. Like, page on is a great example where, like, we contributed, a little bit to it, but for pay joins to go from v zero to v one to v two to the release of v two to go to v three, that's a four to five year effort, in total that, required, I don't know how many people. And to go to v three is gonna also take, like, you know, two to three to four, like, almost like full time people to, like, to get there.
And even for a company like Bullbick, it's like it's above my budgets to fund the entire page on the thing. Like, I can't, I can't, you know, I have other employees, you know, that I have to take care of. So a lot of these things like, like kind of like wouldn't happen and even stuff like, like arcade and like, you know, who knows how they're going to make money. It's, it's, it's, it's very, very experimental. But I, I, I think that, you know, there is money to be made in open source software. We're very fortunate at Bold Bitcoin that we have, you know, the only profitable business model in the space Yeah. Which is like Bitcoin brokerage. Buy, sell Bitcoin. Yeah. Buy or sell Bitcoin. Charge a reasonable fee. Yeah. Exactly. And like, there there's there's others but like, you know, there's others but, you know, mostly that's that's the one and then so, and then we we use I use open source as a marketing tool. Yeah. Right? So and it's not just for that, obviously. Like, I do it because I I do it because, like, out of out of ego, out of pride, and out of, since there is a sincere there is a sincere desire, to to help Bitcoin and and and to do something. And it's where we hold the line. Right? Sort of software is where we hold the line. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's foundational. It's it's the it's the core of the freedom movement. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. And it it's also it's also really fun, to be perfectly honest. Like, as someone who's dealt with governments and banks and, you know, running a Bitcoin exchange is just an endless and endless stream of problems. Like, every day I wake up, I open my phone and it's just like problem, problem, problem, problem. But, like, what I've I have found with open source is this really satisfying, purely creative, unrestrained like, Like, you can do anything in open source development, and you don't have to you don't need to ask anybody's permission. And, like, the sky is the fucking limit. Like, software is magic. You know? The more I the more I discover open source software, the more I'm just, like, like, happy. You know? So working for me, working in open source software is what allows me to swallow the shit of, like, the fiat world of running exchange is, like, knowing that at least half of my day is gonna be interesting, which is the half of my day where I'm working with the open source desk. I love it. Francis, this is great. Let's do this more often? Yeah. Totally, man. Okay. Yeah. Get some upstairs. Thanks so much, man. Alright.
[01:36:22] ODELL:
Freaks. I hope you enjoyed that. Hopefully, I'll get some more in person rips while I'm here in Lugano. Maybe I won't. Not sure. But, stay on the stack sets. Peace.
Catching up from Lugano: old rips, 2019 memories, and lore
Introducing Bull Wallet: goals, BDK under the hood, and UX vision
Lightning lessons: LDK attempts, liquidity pain, and Phoenix tradeoffs
Fee shocks and “just-in-time” channels: why Liquid entered the plan
Liquid + Boltz atomic swaps: architecture, Rootstock notes, and standards push
Designing for privacy and power users: Sparrow on mobile, Payjoin journey
Data minimization in practice: no push, no cloud leaks, strict dependencies
Shipping realities: iOS approval grind and cross‑platform necessity
Secure versus Instant: Liquid framing, hype cycles, and collaborative custody
The UX–compromise matrix: placing Liquid among trust models
Auto‑swap safety rails: keeping Liquid balances modest by default
Confidential transactions and buying flows: privacy wins via Liquid
Swap providers and resilience: Boltz today, multi‑provider tomorrow
Builders who ship: moving fast, potentially Ark or Spark in the future
Why Ark: unilateral exits, pre‑confirmed states, and costs
Ark tradeoffs without soft forks: watchtowers, refresh, and liveness
Ark vs Liquid in Bull Wallet: timelines, reckless testing, and user defaults
Payjoin, heuristics, and passive consolidation
Consolidation strategies: Liquid swaps, CT, and fee‑aware UTXO management
Lightning address UX with Liquid: directories, costs, and tiny payments
Nostr as a wallet backend: zaps, contact book, and secure comms
Multisig in practice: BitPay’s UX, Miniscript future, and mobile approvals
Operator messaging and alerts: following npubs inside the app
Core v30, OP_RETURN, and policy vs consensus
Funding open source: OpenSats, private companies, and shipping culture
Why open source keeps us sane: creativity, legacy, and closing notes
